Steve Young

Biography

A highly respected leader in speech and language processing, the innovations developed by Prof. Steve Young continue to advance the state-of-the art in translating spoken words into text. Prof. Young developed the HTK Toolkit for hidden Markov model-based speech recognition, which has become indispensable software in research laboratories worldwide and has served as the basis for training many commercial speech recognition systems. Techniques including decision-tree state clustering and parallel model combination have enabled speech recognition systems that are more robust to additive and convolutional noise. Prof. Young’s research in applying statistical techniques to spoken dialogue systems aims to revolutionize the development of systems that integrate natural conversational speech interactions between users and information systems such as in call centers, mobile devices, and other applications.

An IEEE Fellow, Prof. Young is a professor with the University of Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, UK.