Scott Fahlman

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Scott Fahlman

Scott Elliot Fahlman (born March 21, 1948, in Medina, Ohio, U.S.) is a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. He is notable for early work on automated planning in a blocks world, on semantic networks, on neural networks (and, in particular, the cascade correlation algorithm) and on Common Lisp (in particular CMU Common Lisp). Recently, Fahlman has been engaged in constructing a Knowledge Base, Scone, based in part on his thesis work on the NETL Semantic Network.

In addition, he is credited with originating the first smiley emoticon,^[1]^[2]^[3] which he thought would help people on a message board at Carnegie Mellon to distinguish serious posts from jokes. He proposed the use of :-) and :-( for this purpose, and the symbols caught on. The original message board post from which these symbols originated was posted on September 19, 1982. It was retrieved in 2002 by a team of computer specialists seeking to validate the claim.

This was the message:

19-Sep-82 11:44    Scott E  Fahlman             :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>
 
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
        
:-)
        
Read it sideways.  Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends.  For this, use
        
:-(

Though credited with originating the smiley emoticons, he was not the first emoticon user; a similar marker appeared in an article of Reader's Digest in May of 1967.^[4]

Fahlman received his bachelor's degree and master's degree in 1973 from MIT, and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1977. His thesis advisors were Drs Gerald Sussman and Marvin Minsky. He is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.

Fahlman acted as the thesis advisor for Donald Cohen, David McDonald, David S. Touretzky, Skef Wholey, and Justin Boyan.

From May 1996 to July 2000, Fahlman directed Justsystem Pittsburgh Research Center.

[edit] Smiley Award

He and his colleagues, in the fall of 2007, created a student contest, a student award to foster innovation in technology-assisted person-person communication. ^[5]