In the article "Making Mona Lisa Smile" we are talking about how Professor Thomas Huang just came out with the Facial Action Coding System. It is supposed to be able to detect exactly how other people are feeling. Even if they are trying to hide their emotions it can still know how people are feeling. It is the latest innovation at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science at the University of

Illinois. He was working in collaboration with Professor Nicu Seve of the University of Amsterdam.

I am all for the value of using this technology to read students' emotional expressions. All it does is beginnig with the computer construction a 3-D computer model of the face. All 44 major muscles in the model must move like human muscles. Then Dr. Huang relies on the work of psychologists, such as Dr. Paul Eckman, who is the creator of the Facial Action Coding System. He has classified six basic emotions. Happiness, surprise, anger, disgust, fear, and sadness. He then associated each with characteristic movements of the facial muscles. When you raise your eyebrows you are surprised and when you tighten your lips you show anger. This will really help us show how different people are feeling. If they are doing something for school such as a lesson on a computer and the way it is being done is making them bored or tired then it will be able to tell us and it can change the way the lesson is being taught so that they will become more interested. If you raise your lips to the corners of your mouth, then squint your eyes slightly to produce wrinkling at the corners of your eyes, holding that raise the outer parts of your cheeks up toward your eyes. The emotion that you are doing is that your face looks happy. If we have this then we will be able to feel someone else's emotioinal state because wer unconsciously imitate another person's facial expressions.

In conclusion Dr. Huang made the Facial Action Coding System. It can help us tell how others are feeling and tell if they are trying to hide their emotions. It can help us when we get bored when we are on our computers doing things for school. It can help make things more interesting so that we don't fall asleep or stop doing what we need to do. It can also help us feel someone else's emotional state because we unconscioiusly imitate another person's facial expressions.