Nora McDonald

NSF CAREER award will support teen autonomy in age of AI

Nathan Kahl — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:45:38 +0000

NSF CAREER award will support teen autonomy in age of AI Nathan Kahl Tue, 06/09/2026 - 11:45

Adolescence has always been a time of figuring out who you are. Increasingly, that process unfolds alongside social media feeds, recommendation algorithms, and AI chatbots. 91��’s Nora McDonald received a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award for $748,000 to better understand how adolescents experience and are shaped by these artificial intelligence (AI) and other personalized digital environments, and how they can develop the skills and capacities necessary to maintain their sense of self, autonomy, and agency within them.

McDonald, an assistant professor in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology, has spent several years studying a growing reality of adolescent life, and one increasingly shaped by personalized AI technologies. Her research has found that social media recommendation systems and AI chatbots can serve as spaces where young people reflect on themselves, experiment with identity, and seek feedback about who they are.

McDonald's work will give teens tools to properly engage with digital technologies. iStock photo.

“Much of the public conversation has been about how algorithms influence what kids see and how we go down rabbit holes,” McDonald said. “I’m interested in a different question: How do algorithms shape self-understanding and how do teens make sense of themselves in environments that are increasingly personalized and shaped by algorithms and AI?”

McDonald’s previous research suggests that even while teenagers often view AI chatbots and recommendation systems as practical tools, those systems can become important spaces for self-exploration and self-presentation.

“Over time, teens might come to expect these systems to reflect aspects of who they are,” McDonald said. “They use them not just for help with homework or entertainment, but also to explore and understand themselves.”

Those findings raise broader questions about identity development during adolescence. If recommendation systems continually influence what young people see, what feedback they receive, and what content captures their attention, how will that affect how they see themselves?

McDonalds's CAREER project will investigate that question through what she calls a resilience framework that examines how adolescents recognize, interpret, and respond to algorithmic influence and how it relates to the coherence of their sense of self.

The research combines interviews, diary studies, surveys, and participatory design activities to better understand how adolescents interpret and respond to algorithmic systems. McDonald will recruit teenagers from across the country, beginning with qualitative studies and eventually expanding to a national survey designed to generate broader statistical insights.

One major outcome of the project will be the development of practical resources and activities designed with teenagers to help them navigate personalized digital environments.

The effort differs from traditional digital literacy initiatives that focus primarily on explaining how algorithms work. “It helps them reflect on algorithmic influence and develop strategies that are really rooted in managing attention and maintaining perspective on who they are outside of digital experiences,” McDonald said.

The CAREER award also supports substantial educational activities. McDonald plans to develop a new undergraduate course focused on algorithmic self-defense from a human-computer interaction perspective. The project will also support a youth summer institute for high school students helping young people to critically engage with AI personalized digital technologies that increasingly shape their everyday experiences.

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IST professors unveil human-AI collaboration tool to automate cartoon colorization

tdonnel — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 18:37:16 +0000

IST professors unveil human-AI collaboration tool to automate cartoon colorization tdonnel Fri, 10/10/2025 - 14:37

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Sungsoo Ray Hong

Yotam Gingold

91�� Information and Sciences (IST) Assistant Professor Sungsoo Ray Hong has always loved cartoons. Now he’s helping the artists who make them.

Drawing on his expertise in human-computer interaction (HCI) and artificial intelligence (AI), Hong and colleague Yotam Gingold, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science (CS) created ShadowMagic, a new human-AI collaboration tool designed to make one of the most time-consuming parts of comic creation faster and easier.

The idea for ShadowMagic emerged from interviews with professional cartoonists. Hong, Gingold and their PhD students wanted to reduce the burden of shadowing, a task many artists find repetitive and time-consuming.

“Professional cartoonists are sometimes producing content every other day,” said Hong, who is also director of George Mason’s Alignment Lab. “You cannot commit to these kinds of deadlines doing everything by yourself. That's why the colorization industry is so helpful to professional cartoonists.”

Colorization is a multi-step process of line drawing, flatting, base colorization, adding shadows and lighting, backgrounds, and other special effects. It is “fairly standardized, especially in South Korea and growing throughout the United States,” said Hong, who is from South Korea. ShadowMagic builds on an earlier project, FlatMagic, another AI-driven colorization tool designed to support digital comic professionals.

While there are existing AI tools that help with colorization, Hong and Gingold found that these tools require more work than doing it manually. They wanted to design a system that better augments cartoonists’ work and cuts down on shadowing, a labor intensive and, according to cartoonists, decidedly uncreative part of the process.

“We looked at artistic challenges, usually tedious things that aren’t so fun for the artists and break down those problems, so that they can focus more on the creative parts of it,” said Gingold, who directs George Mason’s Computational Reality, Creativity, and Graphics Lab.

Gringold explained that there are millions of pixels in an image, and if an artist wants to move or change the color of an object, they currently have to point at one pixel among the millions.

Yotam Gingold (left) and Ray Hong in Research Hall, presenting their colorization tool. Photo by Cristian Torres/Office of University Branding.

Gingold’s research applies computer science to visual, geometric, and design problems. He has “always been interested in sketching and how computers can help us express ourselves.” Many of his algorithms automate filling in pixels and handling visual constraints.

“The computers will do the math where we can write formulas to update all the other millions of pixels. Another example would be keeping lines parallel and corners perpendicular, and that’s where a lot of my research comes in,” he said.

Chuan Yan, PhD ’24, was recruited by Gingold for this project and conducted research on sketching and painting. Yan, now a postdoctoral research at Stanford University, brought expertise in computer graphics and sketch-related computer vision techniques, which he had studied extensively with Gingold.

The team built ShadowMagic as an Adobe Photoshop plug-in, and since its release, it has attracted a lot of interest from professional artists.

“Artists have expressed a strong desire for a tool that could free them from the labor-intensive flatting process,” said Yan. “This response is both exciting and humbling. It confirms that our research is addressing a real need in the industry yet also highlights the remaining challenges in making [the tool] ready for widespread adoption.”

Yan believes ShadowMagic is just the beginning of a broader shift in creative industries towards tools that amplify creativity rather than replace it.

“I am excited to witness and contribute to this transformation, helping to shape a future where AI acts as a powerful tool that amplifies human creativity rather than replacing it,” he said.

Read the full paper: ShadowMagic: Designing Human-AI Collaborative Support for Comic Professionals’ Shadowing by Amrita Ganguly, Chuan Yan, John Joon Young Chung, Tong Steven Sun, Yoon Kiheon, Yotam Gingold, and Sungsoo Ray Hong. It was presented at UIST 2024.

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NSF CAREER award will support teen autonomy in age of AI

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IST professors unveil human-AI collaboration tool to automate cartoon colorization

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