Scott Fahlman
Scott Elliott Fahlman (born March 21, 1948) is an American computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute and Computer Science Department. He is notable for early work on automated planning and scheduling in a blocks world, on semantic networks, on neural networks (especially the cascade correlation algorithm), on the programming languages Dylan, and Common Lisp (especially CMU Common Lisp), and he was one of the founders of Lucid Inc. During the period when it was standardized, he was recognized as "the leader of Common Lisp." From 2006 to 2015, Fahlman was engaged in developing a knowledge base named Scone, based in part on his thesis work on the NETL Semantic Network. He also is credited with coining the use of the emoticon.
Quotes
[edit]- I am a Professor Emeritus in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science (SCS). That means I am formally retired, but still active in research, advising, and departmental activities. My home department is the Language Technologies Institute (LTI). I am also emeritus faculty in the Computer Science Department (CSD).
- As a researcher, I am primarily interested in Artificial Intelligence and its applications. I have 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. I am also interested in the use of AI techniques to build better user interfaces and context-aware systems.
- Currently, I am 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 I developed for my Ph.D. thesis in the late 1970s, but the Scone system is designed to run on standard laptops, desktop machines, and servers rather than on special parallel hardware.
- My 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. I believe 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.
- I am also working on some ideas for new learning architectures for deep-learning networks, inspired in part by the Cascade Correlation architecture that I developed in 1990 with Chris Lebiere.
- I was one of the core developers of the Common Lisp language, and my 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, I 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.
