In the age of technology, we are constantly searching for better ways to communiucate to computers. It seems as though they are just blocks of plastic, wiring, and metal that have no empathy, brains, or hearts. But what if computers could understand human emotion? The computer could know what we are feeling and give us results to match that mood. This is becoming a reality for society today, as a new software, the Facial Action Coding System has promising results for understanding and catergorizing human emotions. This technology could be used in the classroom, where it would provide a better learning environment for students if the computer could understand the students and know if they were bored or tired, and would adjust its program accordingly.

The Facial Action Coding System was created by Prof. Thomas Huang of the University of Illnois and Prof. Nicu Sebe of the University of Amsterdam. The FACS first costructs a 3-D model of the face with all 44 face muscles. Movement of one or muscles is called an action unit. Dr. Paul Eckman, another creator of FACS, has "classified six basic emotions: happiness, surprise, anger, disgust, fear, and sadness, and then associated them with charactersitic movements of the facial muscles." The FACS was tested on the Mona Lisa, and detected her as "83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, and 2 percent angry." A computer being able to understand human emotion would be groundbreaking, as "most human communication is nonverbal, including, emotional communication." We as humans have a variety of expressions, from huge ones to very subtle changes in mood. Computers need to understand these, along with the subtle facial movements that go with them. A extensive calculation is needed in order to acheive this goal. We humans perform this 'calculation' every day, as we can tell how a friend is feeling by the look on their face by taking their facial cues into consideration of their emotion. A comptuter that could a similar thing as such would know when you're happy or sad, and then react accordingly. If you were to smile at a Web ad, it would send a similar one. But if you frowned, the next one would be different. "A classroom computer could recognize when a student is becoming confused or bored," Dr Hunag predicts. "Then it could modify the lesson, like an effective human instructor." This would allow for a better learning environment and teaching skills for students.

The use of this technology would be outstanding and unbelievably helpful in the classroom. It could accurately identify a student's emotions and change the lesson plan to meet their own academic needs. This technology not only can identify emotions, but can help humans to react to them. With more expressive characters in video games and movies, humans can identify and repilcate such emotions, as we have empathy. Empathy may happen because we unconciously imitate another person's facial expressions, and computers with the FACS software could allow for that and much more to occur. Technology as we know it today could be changed forever. If computers do acquire the FACS software, then it would be able to identify human emotions and adjust accordingly.