Succes 2011: Scott Fahlman, computer scientist credited with originating the first smiley emoticon

Scott Elliot Fahlman (n. 21 martie, 1948, în Medina, Ohio, SUA) este un informatician la Universitatea Carnegie Mellon. Este cunoscut pentru munca sa de pionierat în planificare automată, rețele semantice, rețele neuronale (algoritmul Cascade correlation) și la limbajul Common Lisp (în special la CMU Common Lisp).
Fahlman a obținut o diplomă și un master în 1973 de la MIT și doctoratul (Ph.D.) de la MIT în 1977. Supervizorii tezei sale au fost Gerald Sussman și Marvin Minsky. Este membru al Asociației Americane de Inteligență Artificială.

Doctoranzi importanți ai lui Fahlman au fost Donald Cohen, David McDonald, David S. Touretzky, Skef Wholey și Justin Boyan.
În perioada mai 1996 – iulie 2000, Fahlman a fost directorul Justsystem Pittsburgh Research Center.
I se atribuie prima utilizare a unei emotigrame smiley, ^[1][2][3]. A considerat că folosirea smiley-urilor va ajuta persoanele participante la o conversație online să distingă glumele de textele serioase. A propus utilizarea semnelor :-) și :-( pentru acest scop. Mesajul originar a fost postat la 19 septembrie 1982.

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Scott Elliott 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), on the Dylan programming language, 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.

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 Patrick Winston. He is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.
Fahlman acted as thesis advisor for Donald Cohen, David B. McDonald, David S. Touretzky, Skef Wholey, Justin Boyan, Michael Witbrock, and Alicia Tribble Sagae.
From May 1996 to July 2000, Fahlman directed the Justsystem Pittsburgh Research Center.

Fahlman 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 from which these symbols originated was posted on September 19, 1982. The message was recovered by Jeff Baird on September 10, 2002^[4] and is quoted below:

19-Sep-82 11:44    Scott E  Fahlman             :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman 
 
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
        
:-( 

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.