Stephen John Young (born 1951) is a British researcher, Professor of Information Engineering at the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

and an entrepreneur. He is one of the pioneers of

automated speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the mai ...

and statistical spoken dialogue systems. He served as the Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge from 2009 to 2015, responsible for planning and resources. From 2015 to 2019, he held a joint appointment between his professorship at Cambridge and

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus '' Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ances ...

, where he was a senior member of the

Siri Siri ( ) is a virtual assistant that is part of Apple Inc.'s iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, tvOS, and audioOS operating systems. It uses voice queries, gesture based control, focus-tracking and a natural-language user interface to answer ques ...

development team.

Early life and education

Young was born in Liverpool on 23 January 1951. He studied at the

, completing a BA in Electrical Sciences in 1973 and a PhD in speech recognition in 1978, under the supervision of Professor Frank Fallside at the Engineering Department. He held lectureships at both Manchester and Cambridge before being elected to the Chair of Information Engineering at Cambridge University in 1994.

Research and academic career

He is best known as the leading author of the HTK toolkit, a software package for using

hidden Markov model A hidden Markov model (HMM) is a statistical Markov model in which the system being modeled is assumed to be a Markov process — call it X — with unobservable ("''hidden''") states. As part of the definition, HMM requires that there be an ob ...

s to model time series, mainly used for speech recognition. Its first version was originally developed by Young at the Machine Intelligence Laboratory of the

Cambridge University Engineering Department The University of Cambridge Department of Engineering is the largest department at the University of Cambridge and one of the leading centres of engineering in the world. The department's aim is to address the world's most pressing challenges wit ...

(CUED) in 1989. Due to the growing popularity of the toolkit worldwide, Microsoft decided to make the core HTK toolkit available again and licensed the software back to CUED after its acquisition of Entropic, the startup Steve co-founded in 1993 to distribute and maintain the HTK toolkit. The HTK book, which is the tutorial of the HTK toolkit, has received more than 7,000 citations. In the late nineties, Young's research interests shifted to the design of statistical spoken dialogue systems. His most notable contribution to the field is the

partially observable Markov decision process A partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) is a generalization of a Markov decision process (MDP). A POMDP models an agent decision process in which it is assumed that the system dynamics are determined by an MDP, but the agent cannot ...

(POMDP) based dialogue management framework, which includes the Hidden Information State (HIS) dialogue model, the first practical dialogue management model based on the POMDP framework. His research focuses on developing spoken dialogue systems that are robust against noise introduced by noisy speech recognisers, as well as adapt and scale on-line in interaction with real users. One notable instance of this approach is the application of

Gaussian process In probability theory and statistics, a Gaussian process is a stochastic process (a collection of random variables indexed by time or space), such that every finite collection of those random variables has a multivariate normal distribution, i.e. ...

based

reinforcement learning Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning concerned with how intelligent agents ought to take actions in an environment in order to maximize the notion of cumulative reward. Reinforcement learning is one of three basic machine ...

for rapid policy optimisation. In recent years, Young's research group has successfully applied deep learning techniques to various submodules of statistical dialogue systems, winning multiple best paper awards at prestigious speech and NLP conferences.

Entrepreneurship

Apart from his academic and scientific contributions, Young is also a successful entrepreneur and he took a leading role in three company acquisitions: * Entropic, a speech recognition software company that developed applications for voice-enabling the web via mobile operators. The company was acquired by Microsoft in 1999. * Phonetic Arts, a speech synthesis company that delivered technology for generating natural expressive speech. The technology developed by the company allowed computer games to say various sentences with different kinds of voices. Phonetic arts was acquired by Google in 2010. * VocalIQ, a dialogue technology company that built the world's first dialogue system application programming interface. The company's technology provided a platform for voice interfaces, allowing businesses to voice-enable mobile devices and proprietary apps. VocalIQ was acquired by Apple in 2015.

Awards and honours

Young is a Fellow of the

Royal Academy of Engineering The Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) is the United Kingdom's national academy of engineering. The Academy was founded in June 1976 as the Fellowship of Engineering with support from Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who became the first senior ...

, the

Institution of Engineering and Technology The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) is a multidisciplinary professional engineering institution. The IET was formed in 2006 from two separate institutions: the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE), dating back to 1871, and ...

(IET), the

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operat ...

(IEEE), the

RSA RSA may refer to: Organizations Academia and education * Rabbinical Seminary of America, a yeshiva in New York City *Regional Science Association International (formerly the Regional Science Association), a US-based learned society *Renaissance S ...

and the

International Speech Communication Association The International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) is a non-profit organization and one of the two main professional associations for speech communication science and technology, the other association being the IEEE Signal Processing Society ...

(ISCA). He received the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award in 2004, and the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement in 2010. He also received the European Signal Processing Society Individual Technical Achievement Award in 2013, and the IEEE James L Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award in 2015. In 2020 he was elected a

Fellow of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the judges of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematic ...

(FRS) Young was appointed

Commander of the Order of the British Empire The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service. It was established ...

(CBE) in the

2022 Birthday Honours The 2022 Queen's Birthday Honours are appointments by some of the 15 Commonwealth realms of Queen Elizabeth II to various orders and honours to reward and highlight good works by citizens of those countries. The Birthday Honours are awarded as p ...

for services to software engineering.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Young, Steve 1951 births Living people British computer scientists Engineering professors at the University of Cambridge Alumni of the University of Cambridge Fellow Members of the IEEE Fellows of the Royal Society Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering British software engineers Commanders of the Order of the British Empire