Scott Fahlman
Encyclopedia
Computer scientist
A computer scientist is a scientist who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....
at Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
. He is notable for early work on automated planning in a blocks world
Blocks world
The blocks world is one of the most famous planning domains in artificial intelligence. The program was created by Terry Winograd and is a limited-domain natural-language system that can understand typed commands and move blocks around on a surface....
, on semantic network
Semantic network
A semantic network is a network which represents semantic relations among concepts. This is often used as a form of knowledge representation. It is a directed or undirected graph consisting of vertices, which represent concepts, and edges.- History :...
s, on neural network
Neural network
The term neural network was traditionally used to refer to a network or circuit of biological neurons. The modern usage of the term often refers to artificial neural networks, which are composed of artificial neurons or nodes...
s (and, in particular, the cascade correlation algorithm
Cascade correlation algorithm
Cascade-Correlation is an architecture and supervised learning algorithm for artificial neural networks developed by Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon in 1990....
), on the Dylan programming language, and on Common Lisp
Common Lisp
Common Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 , . From the ANSI Common Lisp standard the Common Lisp HyperSpec has been derived for use with web browsers...
(in particular CMU Common Lisp). Recently, Fahlman has been engaged in constructing a Knowledge Base
Knowledge base
A knowledge base is a special kind of database for knowledge management. A Knowledge Base provides a means for information to be collected, organised, shared, searched and utilised.-Types:...
, "Scone", based in part on his thesis work on the NETL Semantic Network.
Fahlman received his bachelor's degree
Bachelor's degree
A bachelor's degree is usually an academic degree awarded for an undergraduate course or major that generally lasts for three or four years, but can range anywhere from two to six years depending on the region of the world...
and master's degree
Master's degree
A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
in 1973 from MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
, and his Ph.D.
Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
from MIT in 1977. His thesis advisors were Drs Gerald Sussman and Patrick Winston
Patrick Winston
Patrick Henry Winston is an American computer scientist, and is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Winston was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997, succeeding Marvin Minsky, who left to found the MIT Media Lab and succeeded by Rodney Brooks...
. He is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence
American Association for Artificial Intelligence
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence or AAAI is an international, nonprofit, scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines...
.
Fahlman acted as thesis advisor for Donald Cohen, David B. McDonald, David S. Touretzky
David S. Touretzky
David S. Touretzky is a research professor in the Computer Science Department and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University. He received a BA in Computer Science at Rutgers University in 1978, and earned a Master's degree and a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Carnegie...
, Skef Wholey, Justin Boyan, Michael Witbrock
Michael Witbrock
Michael Witbrock is a computer scientist in the field of artificial intelligence. A native of New Zealand, he currently lives in Austin, Texas, and is the current Vice President of Research at Cycorp, which is carrying out the Cyc project in an effort to produce a genuine Artificial Intelligence.-...
, and Alicia Tribble Sagae.
From May 1996 to July 2000, Fahlman directed the Justsystem Pittsburgh Research Center
Justsystem Pittsburgh Research Center
Also known as JPRC and Just Research, Justsystem Pittsburgh Research Center was a late-1990's computer science research laboratory in Pittsburgh, loosely associated with Carnegie Mellon University. Its director was Dr...
.
Emoticons
Fahlman is credited with originating the first smileySmiley
A smiley, smiley face, or happy face, is a stylized representation of a smiling human face, commonly occurring in popular culture. It is commonly represented as a yellow circle with two black dots representing eyes and a black arc representing the mouth...
emoticon
Emoticon
An emoticon is a facial expression pictorially represented by punctuation and letters, usually to express a writer’s mood. Emoticons are often used to alert a responder to the tenor or temper of a statement, and can change and improve interpretation of plain text. The word is a portmanteau word...
, 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 from which these symbols originated was posted on September 19, 1982. The message was recovered by Jeff Baird on September 10, 2002 and is quoted below:
| pre.raw style="border: 0px;"> 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
Reader's Digest
Reader's Digest is a general interest family magazine, published ten times annually. Formerly based in Chappaqua, New York, its headquarters is now in New York City. It was founded in 1922, by DeWitt Wallace and Lila Bell Wallace...
in May 1967. In an interview printed in the New York Times in 1969, Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
noted, "I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile—some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket."