Faculty Advisor - Associate Professor - Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
304.293.0960
Frances Van Scoy was born in Huron County, Ohio. She considers herself a semi-native of West Virginia since her maternal grandparents were born in the South Branch Valley of West Virginia and she has lived as a "West Virginian by choice" for over half her life.
She earned a B.S. in mathematics from Michigan State University and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Virginia. She has been a faculty member at Old Dominion University and a visiting scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and at Gifu University (Japan). She is now an associate professor of computer science at West Virginia University.
Her current research involves recognizing specific thoughts of people from EEG signals. Her near-term goal is an inexpensive assistive and therapeutic system for people with aphasia from traumatic brain injury. Her long-term (and ambitious!) goal is a noninvasive and affordable system that will construct from the thoughts of the writer a rough draft of a short story in the form of a text document or a video.
She is the coordinator for WVU's graduate certificate in Interactive Technologies and Serious Gaming and the advisor for the Game Developers Club. She and Jeffrey Moser are currently working together in the Reed College of Media Innovation Center on a project in which art, computer science, and journalism students are collaboratively developing new arcade games powered by Raspberry Pis and packaged in custom-built 3d-printed game consoles.
One of her game-related research projects is applying artificial intelligence to the development of a proof-of-concept game for middle school girls which generates a "chapter book" based on gameplay. At the end of playing the game, the player will receive in electronic form a novel based on her experiences in the world of the game along with additional descriptions of the world, back story, and events that occurred during her time in the world but were not observed by her. The book should be enjoyable to read by someone who is not aware of the existence of the game. That is, it is much more than a transcript of game play.
She is also experimenting with the use of a new time-travel game mechanic by using it in a game (under-development) based on her short story "There Were Giants in the Earth," inspired by South Branch Valley folklore about giants and dinosaurs who co-existed in the region in pre-historic times.