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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

#121

How come she is everywhere on the internet but not at the presentation panel on live conference that was yesterday? Jeez why the downvotes? It's a legitimate question I had.

Because she's a woman.

There was a woman in the panel of press-release conference.

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/graphs/contributors Huh, I wonder how accurate this is. All the code is beyond me in any case, I'm in no position to judge the relative value of any of it.

This is deeply offensive. I'm the owner and founder of my company and I haven't written any meaningful code for our core products in 10 years. Our github repo has barely a scratch from me in it. Does this make my work, my hard long hours in managing my team and designing the product, worthless?

Honestly I'd take satisfaction in what I had built. As a leader I'd greatly enjoy giving credit to the team who committed to my vision and made it a reality.

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

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/graphs/contributors Huh, I wonder how accurate this is. All the code is beyond me in any case, I'm in no position to judge the relative value of any of it.

This is deeply offensive. I'm the owner and founder of my company and I haven't written any meaningful code for our core products in 10 years. Our github repo has barely a scratch from me in it. Does this make my work, my hard long hours in managing my team and designing the product, worthless?

It's offensive and frustrating. I don't understand why people have to try and pull holes in this kind of celebration like there is some conspiracy to promote Katie at the cost of others.

If I read it right, she mentioned and praised her team as well.

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

#124
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so much display of misogyny and sexism against a woman scientist There are no woman scientists, science has no gender. The article is sexiest not people who are curious what Dr. Bouman actually did to be honored to mention in BBC article.

We don’t exist in a purely meritocratic and egalitarian society. Maybe you have never been told that you are not good enough for some work but growing up in deeply paternalistic society, I constantly heard “women are too stupid for hard sciences and they should just stick to kitchens”. If celebrating her achievements in this way changes minds of a few people and inspires a few girls to believe in themselves, I think…

> I grew up hearing women are too stupid for hard sciences

Bad for you.

Thanks God I grew up in a society where every person no matter of gender and age can do hard science.

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

#125

I posted a comment 10 minutes ago and it got immediately downvoted into oblivion. Could you guys please tell me why it is such a bad question to ask? Thank you! Here it is: Does it really count as an image of a black hole? Since no light is reflected by the black hole, all we see is light bend by the gravity of the black hole. Haven't we seen that before? I have the strong feeling there have been photos of star const…

> Could you guys please tell me why it is such a bad question to ask? Because it's nitpicking[0]. When scientists show you results of several years of work of many people, you effectively chose to ask question like "Is it really violet? Seems more purple to me". You don't contribute anything to discussion, but just want to sound smart-ass. [0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nitpicking

Thanks!

The link says nitpicking is "Looking for small or unimportant errors".

That is certainly not what I want to do.

The press is full of articles about this "First photo of a black hole". This seems to imply that it is somehow important. But so far, I fail to see what is important about it.

So my question still stands. I would really like to know in what sense this is the first image of a black hole. And if there is something we can learn from looking at it.

My first impression is "Yeah, it's round. I would have thought so." :)

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

#126
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t exist in a purely meritocratic and egalitarian society. Maybe you have never been told that you are not good enough for some work but growing up in deeply paternalistic society, I constantly heard “women are too stupid for hard sciences and they should just stick to kitchens”. If celebrating her achievements in this way changes minds of a few people and inspires a few girls to believe in themselves, I think…

> I grew up hearing women are too stupid for hard sciences Bad for you. Thanks God I grew up in a society where every person no matter of gender and age can do hard science.

Nobody is saying that only some societies have both genders doing hard sciences. It’s the matter of opportunity.

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

#128
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add some more context... of the 850k lines, 500k lines are mostly models and machine generated code. Andrew is definitely smart (smarter than an average HN user) and his code is very important but I have never seen so much display of misogyny and sexism against a woman scientist. She never took any credit and clearly said that this was a team effort. Some of the top posts on reddit are trying to mischaracterize th…

> so much display of misogyny and sexism against a woman scientist There are no woman scientists, science has no gender. The article is sexiest not people who are curious what Dr. Bouman actually did to be honored to mention in BBC article.

People don’t surrender their outside identity when they become a scientist.

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

#129

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?

It depends a bit on the scientific field, but in mine (computer vision, which this was also published in) the first author is the "main" author, usually doing most if not all the "ground work", then you have collaborators and co-authors, and finally the supervisors (in the case of the PhD student that she was at the time). It is becoming more common to see papers with "Author1, Author2, Author3..." lists, where the "*" authors count with equal contribution. This is important for attribution and the infamous metrics that funding often depends on, but it's not the case here.

So I'm certain those authors did their part, so maybe yes, I should have linked this as "Bouman et al." but I wouldn't expect this to be six equal contributions either.

That all being said, she's certainly standing on the shoulders of a pyramid of giants there.

Edit: to the people downvoting the parent, maybe explain? I didn't take this as a bad faith comment. It can be genuinely confusing to someone who doesn't know the ins and outs of academic attribution...

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

#130

Here's a HN story from a while back titled "The Man Behind Windows PowerShell"[0]. Of the 129 comments on that story, not one discussed how software development at Microsoft is always a team effort. Or checked any repositories counting LoC to quantify the value of his contribution. Meanwhile, in this thread, I see 6 of 73 comments as of now not discussing a woman's relative contribution to a team effort, and how she…

If you ask people in the know "who is the person behind Windows PowerShell?" it is very likely that they will agree.

I wouldn't expect the answer to "who is the person behind the first black hole image?" to be so clear.

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