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Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

bbc.com

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Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#471

Post by organsnyder »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #347
streb-lo wrote: post #313

Serious question HN: If Katie was a man do you think people would be going through git histories and their published papers trying to determine if she is being over-credited for her achievements?

On the one hand, no, not in a public setting. On the other hand, looking at git histories is basically how the social parts of engineering (e.g., money and power) at a place like Google works, at its fundamental level. This has persisted for a very, very long time. I still remember when people would comment things like, "I worked with so-and-so unorthodox former Google employee, and he didn't commit code." There are…

But why would she be assumed to be the product manager (or its equivalent in the academic realm)? She has a doctorate in Computer Science from MIT, so she clearly has the technical chops. And she's in the early stages of her academic career, so she hasn't reached the point where she would have the ability to claim grad students' work as her own (which would also be a huge ethical lapse, though apparently it does happen [often with women as the victims]).

In my experience, people don't start looking into these things without some other suspicion. In a work setting, that would be things like impressions of poor productivity, claimed output not matching perceptions of competency, etc. But those involve a ton of data points, based on direct interactions with the person. In this case, the article gives us the following demographic data points:

- 29 years old

- Woman

- Computer Science doctorate from MIT

- Assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences at the California Institute of Technology

Which of those data points suggests that her work output should be questioned?

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#472

Post by QuotedForTruth »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #451
QuotedForTruth wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: this is based on watching the talk and some basic machine learning knowledge. Im no expert. They have a sparse set of data that is part of an image. They have trained a model to look at the sparse set and make an educated guess about what the full image looks like. They do this by feeding it full images. The full images you feed into the model thus have an effect on the final image generated. In order to…

> that effect is, they trained different versions of the model with different sets of complete images What does training mean? I thought that the training means to adjust Neural Network until it learns to convert our input into expected output of "complete image". But if thaining means to teach the model to produce expected "complete image", then how is it possible that "the output of the model was approximately the…

Training is to feed in thousands of sets of {sparse sample of actual image, actual image}. The model is adjusted until the total difference between the output image and the actual image is minimized across all training images.

The output images are approximately the same because the model is "looking" at training images at a lower level that we do. The talk says they chop the images up into small pieces. So the model never "sees" the full shapes that are in the full images. It only sees small local features. I guess it turns out that these smaller pieces are pretty generic in that they are common between images of black holes and everything else. The curve of an elephant trunk looks similar to the curve of an event horizon if you cut it out in a small enough piece.

Perhaps if they didnt do this step, then the model would be more sensitive to the images its trained on.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#473

Post by read_if_gay_ »

jachee wrote: post #397
n1231231231234 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every media article I've read cites her team-credit emphasis. But that is the problem, actually. Simple question: Is Prof Bouman the team leader that held all this together? In answering this, consider this is from the ERC website, which is the major funding body of the project: > Since 2014, this six year research project is being carried out by three lead scientists and their teams; namely Professors Heino Falcke…

> Simple question: Is Prof Bouman the team leader that held all this together? Why does this bother you so much? What do you lose by her getting credit? Or anyone? What actual harm is it doing?

People generally value fairness and crediting people unfairly goes against that. If it appears to you that other members of the team might have contributed just as much or even more but weren't credited accordingly, then that goes against this "instinct", and why shouldn't it? You're missing the point, the question is whether she was unfairly credited or not.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#474

Post by QuotedForTruth »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #453
pricecomstock wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand, the training input images are just to establish the relationship between sparse data points and full image, regardless of subject matter. Since they were getting the black hole picture out of the trained model regardless of how it was trained, it's likely that the model was producing accurate results of what the "camera" was pointed at. If they had pointed it at an elephant, the model would ha…

> getting the black hole picture out of the trained model regardless of how it was trained Did they try to feed random noise into their trained image builder? I suspect that the output of that trained image builder is always the same "black hole", even with random noise as an input.

Probably not with random noise. With random noise there is literally no connection between pixels. With any actual picture there are connections. Like for instance a pixel is more likely to be the value of its neighbor or nearly so than any random value. This follows from the fact that the pictures are of actual objects with physical properties that determine the value of the pixel that maps to them. Most of the image can be characterized by continuous gradients with occasional edges.

I think if you trained with random noise you would get random noise output.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#475

Post by zeroandjune »

realradicalwash wrote: post #265

Her story is trully inspiring! She seems like a really likable person, has been hard working, with great results, making a major contribution. The photo with her and the hard drives is amazing and I am sure she will inspire many to enter science. However, I think to call her "the woman behind the first black hole image" is a hyperbole. It makes it sound as if she was _the one person_ responsible that all this came ab…

Oh fuck off you wanker

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#476

Post by roguecoder »

belorn wrote: post #464
roguecoder wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We celebrated Mohawk NASA dude just as much as she’s being celebrated. Maybe we just like unabashedly enthusiastic engineers.

This article has 832 up vote points. Can you link the HN article with the "Mohawk NASA dude". Searching on "Mohawk NASA" gave me a 1 point article that didn't get a single upvote. Searching on "Bobak Ferdowsi" gives zero articles on HN, and I could not find any article where even comments were celebrating the achievements of Bobak Ferdowsi, and obviously no 832 point upvoted ones. No, I must conclude that there is no…

Oh, not on here: this site is clearly full of people who hate both fun and science. But the complaint was about how she was being covered by the media, not how she is being discussed here, and there wasn’t a 800+ comment thread complaining about how Ferdowsi, Who got fat more vapid coverage, must not actually have done anything and didn’t deserve attention, and he wasn’t even first author of something.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#477

Post by symlock »

wklauss wrote: post #414
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, absolutely. I've made comments before to the effect of: I cringe hard enough to actually feel physical discomfort every time a headline refers to a team effort of SpaceX as "Elon Musk's Rocket."

Ok, how about "Turing: the genius that cracked the ENIGMA code"?

Well, other arguments aside, there is a little bit of a difference between a single-system ENIGMA and building multi-system spaceships.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#478

Post by throc3 »

sodafountan wrote: post #446
throc3 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I created an account to let you know you should probably apologize and delete this comment. Unless you like this sort of low-effort assholery to be linked to your real name, which took me way too little time to establish.

You can't delete comments from hacker news after a certain period of time has passed and that's ok, I was wrong about the amount of work she committed and in all honesty, I didn't doubt her in any way. I looked up what she had contributed because I was curious and initially I didn't find much. I do apologize for not digger a bit deeper. I still stand by the fact that all people's work of this magnitude should be revi…

There are probably a dozen papers of this magnitude published each month across the sciences with multiple authors and github repos.

Which of them have you dug into before? Any of them?

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#479

Post by ikeyany »

roguecoder wrote: post #416
ikeyany wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not. That said, if Katie was a man, her story would not be as groundbreaking in a social context, and thus she would not be as celebrated.

We celebrated Mohawk NASA dude just as much as she’s being celebrated. Maybe we just like unabashedly enthusiastic engineers.

I don't think he received this much praise.

Re: Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image

#480

Post by jachee »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #473
jachee wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Simple question: Is Prof Bouman the team leader that held all this together? Why does this bother you so much? What do you lose by her getting credit? Or anyone? What actual harm is it doing?

People generally value fairness and crediting people unfairly goes against that. If it appears to you that other members of the team might have contributed just as much or even more but weren't credited accordingly, then that goes against this "instinct", and why shouldn't it? You're missing the point, the question is whether she was unfairly credited or not.

Meanwhile, capitalism is wholly predicated on unfairness, where the "haves" exploit the "have nots" to get as much for themselves as they can.

Why does a woman getting "credited unfairly" strike a nerve when it happens every day that a CEO takes singular credit for an entire corporation worth of people's work with no "Unfair credit!" reaction?

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