Stephen John Young (born 1951) is a British researcher,[1] Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge and an entrepreneur.

He studied at the University of Cambridge, 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.

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.

[12][13] In recent years, Young's research group has successfully applied deep learning techniques to various submodules of statistical dialogue systems,[14][15][16][17] winning multiple best paper awards at prestigious speech and NLP conferences.

[5] In 2020 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) [20] Young was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to software engineering.