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

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

#541

Post by glangdale »

throwAway572683 wrote: post #517
glangdale wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, quite a number of big academic, scientific or industry figures have had stories about their achievements without any major reference to their (obviously necessary) team. No-one felt moved to point out there were contributions from the graduate students and staff that worked with Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio in the HN story about the latter three's Turing Award. I don't think I've ever seen so ma…

I think there is a misconception here. Dr. Bouman is a talented, enthusiastic and no doubt indispensable force on the larger team responsible for this achievement. Her role is as a co-lead for one small team which is responsible for one algorithm (out of four) used for imaging, as well as for an imagine verification algorithm (with Dr. Bouman's focus more on the latter). The larger imaging group (about 45 people by m…

Are you personally involved with the project? I'm curious about the motivation to write (via a throwaway account) a massive thesis debunking the supposedly excessive contribution given to someone who you also refer to as a "no doubt indispensable force".

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

#542

Post by dralley »

patrickg_zill wrote: post #421
lambdadmitry wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a popular hypothesis, but how exactly do you think it may work? It's not like you can see a "blank spot" by looking from radio sources, you'd need to put your antennas in a position where the plain will intersect your line of sight to the transmitter. And not just one, but massive number of lines if you plan to track it and deliver a missile there. It sounds pretty improbable and I believe it's just an urban…

Why let the facts get in the way of your unexamined beliefs? References a paper from 2009 (classified research could well have been much earlier): https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-u-s-navys-next-hawkeye-... Guess what emits UHF/VHF? Terrestrial TV stations and 900Mhz and 700Mhz cell phone towers , like Sprint and Nextel used to operate in the USA before their spectrum was traded/sold back to the government. China…

It's well known that low frequency radars can detect stealth airplanes. But it's difficult to target a missile using them, and they're too big to put anywhere but on the ground.

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

#543

Post by mgfist »

ikeyany wrote: post #321
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?

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.

So how do you explain all the famous male scientists and inventors of history? The most famous of them all are because they discovered cool things, not necessarily the "hardest" or "most significant" thing. Everyone knows e=mc2, but most people do not know about von neuman architecture, even though the latter has had a significantly greater impact on peoples lives. Taking the first picture of a black hole is as sexy as it gets in science. Katie would be famous no matter what she was.

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

#544

Post by mgfist »

newswriter99 wrote: post #368
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?

If Katie was a man, no one would care about her.

Just like all the male scientists in history. I bet you haven't heard of Einstein either then right?

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

#545

Post by mgfist »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #119
black_puppydog wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also in the links in that repo, but may be more interesting to some folks here: Katie's paper on VLBI reconstruction: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413 This is how I learned about the topic and I think it's well suited for computery folks, since it was published in CVPR.

There are 6 authors for that paper, the way you linked it suggested it's solely by her; are the other authors listed honorarily? Similarly the title suggests she worked alone on the project. Which seems exceedingly unlikely given the need for telescope time and computing time and the wide range of disciplines I imagine the project covers ... did she work alone. That must be almost unique in experimentalism nowadays?

If we want to be pedantic, this paper is the work of millions of humans throughout history, who have helped developed the math knowledge for such a project to even be feasible.

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

#546

Post by Kaiyou »

mgfist wrote: post #544
newswriter99 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Katie was a man, no one would care about her.

Just like all the male scientists in history. I bet you haven't heard of Einstein either then right?

Can you namedrop a male scientist that did something in 2019?

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

#547

Post by mgfist »

Kaiyou wrote: post #546
mgfist wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like all the male scientists in history. I bet you haven't heard of Einstein either then right?

Can you namedrop a male scientist that did something in 2019?

Missing the point that this is the first picture of a freaking black hole..
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