Education
He received his bachelor"s degree and master"s degree in 1973 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his Doctor of Philosophy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977.
university professor computer scientist
He received his bachelor"s degree and master"s degree in 1973 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his Doctor of Philosophy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977.
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 Carnegie Mellon University Common Lisp and he was one of the founders of Lucid Incorporated). During the period when it was standardized, he was recognized as "the leader of 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 was born in Medina, Ohio, United States.
His thesis advisors were 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 South. Touretzky, Skef Wholey, Justin Boyan, Michael Witbrock, and Alicia Tribble Sagae.
From May 1996 to July 2001, Fahlman directed the Justsystem Pittsburgh Research Center. Fahlman is credited with originating the first smiley emoticon, 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:
19-September-82 11:44 Scott East Fahlman :-)
From: Scott East 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. Foreign 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 1967.
In an interview printed in the New York Times in 1969, Vladimir Nabokov noted, "I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile — some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket."
In the fall of 2007, Fahlman and his colleagues created a student contest to foster innovation in technology-assisted person–person communication.