A professor in my department (primarily affiliated with the LTI and the CSD, but also the MLD and HCII) invented the smiley 25 years ago on a bboard here at CMU. The fateful message that spawned the smiley is reproduced below [source]:
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)From: Scott E 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 markthings that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use
In honor of the 25th birthday of the smiley, the CS department is holding a TG where Scott will inaugurate an annual Smiley Prize. I’m probably not going to be able to make that, though, on account of other engagements.
I spoke with Scott very briefly last year when I was looking for funding. He is leading up the RADAR project here (which funds me, but through a different professor), but he also works on the Scone project. Scone is an open source knowledge base that takes first order predicate logic several steps further. Knowledge representation is a fascinating topic and one I would have liked to work on. It’s still possible for my PhD, though, so we’ll see.
At the same time, there is a problem in the knowledge representation field in that no one really knows just how well it’s going to work until they have built up ginormous databases of statements and entities, a task that takes thousands of man-hours. Different teams are all working with different, incompatible representations. Getting scientists to agree on the best representation for anything, especially something as complicated and potentially controversial as knowledge base representations, is an empirically attested event of extreme improbability.
[...] glass, I was surprised to see a little pareidolia of the smiley variety. Incidentally, the 26th birthday of the smiley was just a week or so [...]