Professor Steve Young CBE FREng FRS

Steve Young’s main research interests are in artificial intelligence and machine learning, especially the application of speech and language processing in conversational agents.  He was a major contributor to the early development of large vocabulary speech recognition and he pioneered the use of statistical modelling in spoken dialogue management.

He was Head of the School of Technology from 2001 through to 2004 and Senior Pro-Vice Chancellor from 2009 to 2015.  He was a founder and VP Engineering at Entropic Inc acquired by Microsoft in 1999 and founder of VocalIQ Ltd acquired by Apple in 2015.  From 2015 to 2019 he was a Senior Member of Technical Staff in the Siri Development team in Cambridge.

He is a Fellow and Trustee of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the IET and IEEE.  He holds an IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award, the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement, a European Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award and the IEEE James L Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award.

Professional position

  • Emeritus Professor of Information Engineering, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge
  • Venture Partner, Amadeus Capital Partners Limited

Subject groups

  • Computer Sciences

    Artificial intelligence, machine learning, vision, Human-computer interaction

Committees Participated Role
Hooke Committee January 2024 - December 2026 Member
Sectional Committee 0: Computer sciences October 2023 - September 2026 Member