Expertise

Topics:  Artificial Neural Networks, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Representation, Machine Learning

Industries: Writing and Editing, Research, Education/Learning, Computer Software

Scott Fahlman is a Professor Emeritus in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science (SCS). That means Scott is formally retired, but still active in research, advising, and departmental activities. Scott's home department is the Language Technologies Institute (LTI). He is also emeritus faculty in the Computer Science Department (CSD).

As a researcher, Scott is primarily interested in Artificial Intelligence and its applications. He has worked in many areas of AI: planning, knowledge representation and reasoning, image processing, natural language processing, document classification, artificial neural networks, and the use of massively parallel machines to solve AI problems. Scott is also interested in the use of AI techniques to build better user interfaces and context-aware systems.

Currently, Scott is working on Scone, a practical Knowledge Base System (KBS) that can represent a large body of real-world knowledge and that can efficiently perform the kinds of search and inference that seem so effortless for us humans. This work is based in part on the NETL system that Scott developed for his Ph.D. thesis in the late 1970s, but the Scone system is designed to run on standard workstations and servers rather than on special parallel hardware.

Scott's research group has worked on a number of applications of Scone, with a special focus on using Scone to support knowledge-based natural language understanding and generation. Scott believes that Scone-like knowledge base systems will be important tools in the future, perhaps used in even more ways than database systems are used today.

Scott is also working on some ideas for new learning architectures for deep-learning networks, inspired in part by the Cascade Correlation architecture that he developed in 1990 with Chris Lebiere.

Scott is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Scott was one of the core developers of the Common Lisp language, and his research group developed the CMU Common Lisp implementation which formed the basis for many commercial Common Lisp systems, and now is maintained as open-source software, along with a split-off version, Steel Bank Common Lisp.

In 1982, Scott proposed the use of :-) and :-( in posts and Email messages. These are generally regarded as the first internet emoticons, and the text-only ancestors of today’s graphical emojis.

Media Experience

Today, the Emoticon Turns 30 :-)  — The Atlantic
Today, at 11:44 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, the emoticon will likely experience a jolt of joy. Today, at 11:44 a.m., the emoticon will likely experience a pang of angst. Today, at 11:44 a.m., the emoticon will likely take a moment to consider where it is, where it's been, and where it's going. Today, at 11:44 a.m., the emoticon will turn 30.

The emoticon was invented 33 years ago today — here's the professor who created it  — Business Insider
Thirty-three years ago today, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University invented the emoticon. Scott E. Fahlman, along with other members of CMU's computer science community, used online "bulletin boards" to share information, make announcements, and chat, Fahlman recalled in a post on Carnegie Mellon's website.

The 40-year evolution from :-) to  — CNN Business
At 11:44 a.m. on September 19, 1982, Scott Fahlman made internet history by stitching together a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis. Fahlman, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, posted “: - )” on the school’s online bulletin board, a primitive kind of social network accessible only by others on the university’s closed intranet and limited to text only.

My 24 hours without Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon  — Yahoo Finance
It would be simple just to go off into the woods for a day and not engage with these companies, but that wasn’t the point. I wanted to do a full day of work (and some play). And of course some people are more dependent on the tech giants than others, which is usually a function of your preferences and what you do for a living. I think I’m somewhat representative of a typical professional. As Scott Fahlman, professor emeritus of computer science and artificial intelligence at Carnegie Mellon University says, “I could not unplug very long and keep doing my job.”

Want to Feel Old? the Emoticon Is 40 :-)  — Gizmodo
The opportunities were endless as the early Internet stepped into its new role as a digital terra incognita. With a new frontier for humanity to explore and settle, one of the largest unknowns was how language would evolve in this new space. Given the missing opportunity to express emotion with visual cues, it would be too easy for meaning and humanity to be lost within the machinations of digital communication. So in an effort to communicate humor (and lack thereof) more efficiently, professor Scott E. Fahlman from Carnegie Mellon University proposed a pictographic hierarchy to delineate attempts at jokes on the university’s online bulletin board (called a “bboard”).