Scott Fahlman

.

In addition, he is credited with originating the first smiley emoticon, [ [http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/apr2001/nf20010423_785.htm Business Week Online, April 23, 2001] ] [ [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm Scott Fahlman's Smiley Lore page, containing his version of the history, accessed Sept. 19, 2007] ] [cite news
title = :-) turns 25
publisher = Associated Press
date = 2007-09-20
url = http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/09/18/emoticon.anniversary.ap/index.html
accessdate = 2007-09-20 ] 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: 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. [ [http://www.snopes.com/computer/internet/smiley.asp Urban Legends Reference Pages: Emoticon (Smiley) Origin ] ]

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.

miley 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. [Science magazine, 28 Sep. 2007, p.1841]

References

External links

* [http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/ Personal homepage]
* [http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/09/18/emoticon.anniversary.ap/ CNN article]