Happy Birthday Smiley-face :-)

Can it be? Is the Smiley-face :-) emoticon really 25 years old? That's right -- "happy birthday" is in order. Originally created in 1982 by Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Professor Scott Fahlman, Smiley-face officially will be 25 next week.

What inspired Fahlman's creative genius were the lengthy messages in phosphorescent green or orange characters that were constantly being posted to electronic bulletin boards at in CMU's Computer Science Department. Fahlman posted his suggestion in response to a humorous message in which someone was joking about a contaminated elevator in a building. Another person worried that some people might take that as a serious safety warning, provoking a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to mark comments not meant to be taken seriously.

"I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)," wrote Fahlman. "Read it sideways," he added, helpfully. And so, at 11:44 a.m., September 19, 1982, Smiley was born.

While he will always be remembered for :-), it should be noted that Fahlman has performed research in many areas of AI, including problem solving, knowledge representation, image processing, natural language, document classification, artificial neural networks and the use of massively parallel machines to solve AI problems. His current research involves the Scone Knowledge-Base System and he is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

"Scientists and technology leaders the world over know Scott well for his great computer science research," said Peter Lee, head of the Computer Science Department. "His seminal work on knowledge representation contributed fundamentally to the field of artificial intelligence (AI), and his leadership in the design of Common Lisp has had a major impact on programmers and researchers for the past two decades."

In honor of :-), Fahlman and his colleagues are inaugurating the annual "Smiley Award" for innovation in technology-assisted, human-to-human communication. The award will be based on a competition open to individual students and small teams in Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. The winning entry will receive a $500 cash prize, sponsored by Yahoo.

"It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world," said Fahlman. "I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters, and how many have turned their heads to one side to view a Smiley, in the 25 years since this all started."

Posted by Jon Erickson at 11:26 AM  Permalink