Picture perfect emoticons
Elinor Mills Former Staff Writer
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service and the Associated Press.
A former University of Pittsburgh doctoral student and professor have devised a way to turn photos of people's faces into emoticons for use in e-mails, mobile text messages and other communications. Basically, they take a single expressionless photo, slice it into pieces and alter the slices to create separate images of the six basic facial expressions representing happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, disgust and fear, according to an article in Physorg.com. The program, called FaceAlive, was developed by Xin Li, who now works at Google, and his computer science adviser, Shi-Kuo Chang. No word on when they'll be creating the popular "wink" or "hug" emoticons.