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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

#361

Post by papermill »

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?

The answer is an obvious yes. Especially on HN where supposedly we are a technology related site. I suspect the first thing most of us do is to google or ddg github and the computer scientist's name ( male or female ).

The better question is if Katie was a man, would BBC or the media single him out for this level of attention. If Katie was a man would the media be trying to make him the face of this scientific enterprise. If Katie was a man, would that story be pushed to the top of HN and be heavily censored to push a particular narrative.

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

#362

Post by Frost1x »

gentaro wrote: post #203
toomanybeersies wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who didn't realise above, I was being flippant. On a slightly serious note though, I wonder how much productivity is lost in the scientific community due to poorly written and documented code? I've heard stories of 40 year old Fortran code written by long deceased professors that was written to crunch physics numbers or whatever, and when it's come time to modify or add to it, nobody can make head nor tail…

I agree with you that the scientific community is way behind industry standards, but the reason for that is much less of their code is actually designed for reuse. The overwhelming majority of their work is just "let me try writing this code and see what results I get." Industry professionals are forced to take the approach of "I need to write this code to be as maintainable and flexible as possible" because they hav…

There are efforts to integrate more industry standard software engineering practices into research (RSE or "research software engineering" as a phrase is growing in popularity):

US: http://urssi.us UK: https://www.software.ac.uk

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

#363

Post by _zachs »

bigbaguette wrote: post #349
gonational wrote: post #262

Is this the correct repo? https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/graphs/contributors I didn't realize this was public code. It looks like one "achael" is the author of this, though.

If that's the correct repo: klbouman 90 commits 2,410 ++ 1,265 -- achael 566 commits 850,275 ++ 131,044 --

XD

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

#364

Post by doctoboggan »

spyckie2 wrote: post #79

from her paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413 > Very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) is a technique for imaging celestial radio emissions by simultaneously observing a source from telescopes distributed across Earth. The challenges in reconstructing images from fine angular resolution VLBI data are immense. The data is extremely sparse and noisy, thus requiring statistical image models such as those designed i…

This sounds similar to Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) [0] which uses a moving antenna to achieve the affect of a very large aperture.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic-aperture_radar

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

#365

Post by monksy »

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?

Outside of the serious tech community, no one knows who Linus Torvald is. They do know that Linux exists.

Well, I take part of that back. He did have some personal pieces about "he's the guy that's a bully of the project" (when he took a personal hiatus from the project)

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

#366

Post by moyix »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #359

Slightly off-topic - is anyone able to identify the software used in this photo of the first time seeing the black hole? [1] https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190410153403-katie-bo...

At a glance the graph UI looks like matplotlib's.

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

#367

Post by kissgyorgy »

sodafountan wrote: post #335
njepa wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 about. It doesn't say that though. It says she was behind the image. And as I understand she lead one of the teams responsible for creating the image from the data. So I don't think that is particularly inaccurate as far as headlines go.

Well luckily we can verify just how much code she actually committed to the project. The Event Horizon Telescope Analysis Toolkit is a publicly available repository on Github: https://github.com/sao-eht/eat according to Katie's profile klbouman, she was responsible for a subset of that toolkit known as hopstools - which is described in the readme as "tools to convert data from the HOPS format": https://github.com/klb…

It's really short-sighted to say something like this. Committing code is actually the smallest impact you can make in a big project like this. There are way harder, more meaningful ways you can contribute to the project's success.

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

#368

Post by newswriter99 »

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.

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

#369

Post by soVeryTired »

monksy wrote: post #358
steego wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate it when news outlets and movie production companies focus on individuals and ignore the team effort and dynamic, and it's not because I care about distributing credit. I want them to tell more stories about teams and communities working together to build things, not more lone genius stories. I get it. I truly do. But consider the context: This picture of a blackhole is going around along with an iconic picture…

> Margaret Hamilton with a stack of papers. That was used to say "well women are doing something very important" (If we're truly focused on equality should be yes.. that is normal.. but why is that important to advertise that message) The feeling that I'm getting from all of this is that the result is showcased to the side and they're trying to make her into a celebrity. I would love to hear her praise "her team" (he…

> I would love to hear her praise "her team" (her team is a subset of people in the whole project) Although, I don't think she has enough experience to realize that it's a good thing to do.

She did that in the TED talk. And in the article linked above. And basically everywhere else she's spoken.

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

#370

Post by jachee »

realradicalwash wrote: post #344
victor106 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: "But Dr Bouman, ...insisted the team that helped her deserves equal credit."

my criticism is not aimed at her at all - but at the media. and yes, she emphasised this elsewhere, too, which imv shows what a great and humble person she is.

Every media article I've read cites her team-credit emphasis.

What more should the media do? "Faceless, nameless team does X, No film at 11 in case that might make someone look like they're getting too much credit."?

Every team has a leader (de facto or otherwise). Having one voice, one face for a globe-spanning team effort is the way the media can convey the amazing, awesome message to the masses in a relatable way.

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