Scott Fahlman | The Birth, Spread, and Evolution of the Smiley Emoticon

Описание: Scott E Fahlman is a Professor Emeritus of Language Technologies and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He received his PhD degree in Artificial Intelligence from MIT in 1977. Dr. Fahlman is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

As a researcher, Dr. Fahlman 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.

He is currently writing a book on a symbolic, knowledge-based approach to commonsense AI, as an alternative to the unreliable and amazingly inefficient ‘Large Language Models’ that are currently generating so much excitement.
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The Birth, Spread, and Evolution of the Smiley Emoticon

The :-) ‘smiley’ and :-( ‘frowny’ emoticons are now very familiar to users of the Internet, Email, and social media. I first suggested that we use these character-based symbols for online communication in a message that I posted on a Carnegie Mellon University online ‘bulletin board’ on September 19, 1982. At the time I was a young faculty member in CMU’s Department of Computer Science, doing research on AI.

The posting of this message is considered by many, including the Guinness Book of World Records, to be the birth of ‘the digital emoticon’, though the term ‘emoticon’ was coined years later — I don’t know by whom. My silly idea of using text characters to make little faces ‘went viral’ on the primordial computer networks of the day, long before ‘going viral’ was a thing. The Internet was created in the U.S. that very year, and whenever a new site was added to the network, the emoticons soon took root there.

This led to the development of many more text-based emoticons. And then in the 1990s (when the technology was ready to support it) the emoticon idea gave rise to the thousands of graphical emoji that are used today by people in every country of the world, as part of their daily lives. By most estimates, emoticons and emojis are now used several billion times every day.

In this talk I will describe why and how the idea of text-based emoticons popped up, how they spread all around the world, and how they mutated as they spread. I’ll also say a bit about what the future might hold for these symbols, and whether they might ultimately evolve into a complete graphical language, replacing text in at least some instances.