Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind the first black hole image • Hacker News Board

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

#431

Post by roguecoder » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 3:35 AM UTC

ralfd wrote: post #165

matt4077 wrote: post #85

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…

Not really a fitting comparison. Snover is describing himself as inventor of power shell, he pushed the project against resistance of his peers/superiors in Microsoft and implemented the first prototype. Without him it simply wouldn’t exist.

Without her, this wouldn’t exist.

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

#432

Post by roguecoder » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 3:39 AM UTC

negamax wrote: post #66

baq wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may inspire women to pursue a career in computer science. Is it bad even if it's political?

Of course not. She can be a great role model irrespective of gender. Bringing gender into the picture and promoting it as such, transfers group affiliations on divisive lines. Her achievement and work can be inspiring to all children, that should be the ideal political stance and message ethos

People who think that her being a woman is divisive are the ones making it political and divisive. Just accept that women exist and do science, and then it’ll stop being a problem for you when people talk about women exist and do science.

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

#433

Post by raydev » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 3:39 AM UTC

sodafountan wrote: post #342

alukima wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lines of code is not, and will never be a metric for gauging project contribution. Most of that 850,000 lines of code is likely boilerplate setup code.

850,000 loc vs what looks to be an initial commit and a merge: https://github.com/klbouman/hopstools/commits?author=klbouma... if I'm wrong here please point it out

Okay, how about tweets from Andrew Chael himself? https://twitter.com/thisgreyspirit/status/111651854732747571...

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

#434

Post by roguecoder » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 3:43 AM UTC

ummonk wrote: post #303

yetihehe wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

No, it's a legit question. Before I read this article I heard mention of a new picture of a black hole, and I was wondering how it was different from previous pictures. My understanding now is that this is the first time we've observed one accurately enough to get a picture of the Einstein ring around a black hole. And even there, it's heavily reconstructed using machine learning, which I wouldn't call a "photo", mor…

Any digital photo is a reconstruction. Consider all the pictures from the Hubble telescope: these techniques are a far more sophisticated version of the same kinds of techniques used to clean those up.

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

#435

Post by roguecoder » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 3:47 AM UTC

Gpetrium wrote: post #266

Reading some of the comments in here and in previous texts, I think everyone should try to heed to the following guidelines: - When an individual/team's work is emphasized by their biological characteristics, it is often meant for clicks or to drive emotions (positive & negative) - When that happens, ask yourself whether the author of the paper did it for nefarious reasons or not. - If the cause doesn't seem nefariou…

Nothing about this “emphasized” her “biological characteristics”: people are merely massively overreacting to her existence.

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

#436

Post by monksy » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 4:02 AM UTC

themarkn wrote: post #411

monksy wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh.. I had no idea. That's awesome. I made the assumption that she did the academic thing which is "i did this" signed advisor. The assumption was based on the focus of the articles. (editorial bias)

No need to avoid your own responsibility and bias in making that assumption. It's not accurate to blame it on the media coverage alone. Strikes me as more like confirmation bias around what your expectations are for academics, women, or both.

Excuse me?

I admitted that I was incorrect in my impression. I could have deleted the original comment but posted an admission that I was too quick to jump to conclusions.

You should be aware of what the media is trying to say, and how it's presented. This comment section is showing how different countries are presenting the same situation.

Confirmation bias in academics:

It's very common to escalate the work from undergrad->grad->postdoc->professors. (Doing the most work to the least in that order). It's pretty terrible.. but that's how it operates. Does the advisor do much? Do they get their name on the paper, yes. (In many times at the top)

Women- Her gender doesn't matter on this. The work she did for her research is awesome, it's clearly her work. (It's similar to super-resolution) This wasn't a single I just applied my algorithm and everything happened. Lots of people were involved in collecting, cleaning, managing, and adapting her improvement to existing CV algorithms to reproduce what a blackhole looks like.

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

#437

Post by roguecoder » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 4:07 AM UTC

adossi wrote: post #327

rhacker wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> first: by alluding to Ive, you insert a gender component Personally, I want to say the gender component actually happened right about here: >> Her story is trully inspiring! She seems like a really likable person We have interesting ways and subtext when we talk about people that show our biases. Actually beyond that the entire article isn't anything about asking Katie questions or how she came about her algorithm.…

The title of the article reveals a lot about the biases at play here. "Katie Bouman, the computer scientist behind..." - keyword 'the'. She isn't 'the' computer scientist behind it, she is 'a' computer scientist behind it. If it were merely a case of putting an interesting person with likable facial features at the heart of the story the news articles' titles and descriptions could actually be accurate. In actuality…

The fact that you are making it about her appearance instead of her scientific achievement is you, my dude, not the article and not the media. She is first author, she came up with the algorithm, she did this thing, and all your attempts to belittle that just prove Joanna Russ’ absolute correctness.

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

#438

Post by anonytrary » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 4:10 AM UTC

claudiawerner wrote: post #400

anonytrary wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are already doing this on Reddit[0][1], and it's pretty silly because they obviously have no idea how Github or scientific research works. There's an effort underway to undermine Katie Bouman's contributions and it's absolutely ridiculous. Edit: I just checked Twitter, apparently there are thousands of idiots who believe this "850,000/900,000 lines written by Andrew, therefore he wrote the algorithm" narrative…

This[0] comment seems to be another in that vein, though it seems to have more details, even if it repeats the 850k lines stat which doesn't really hold up. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bbql1i/this_is_dr_kat...

The analysis you linked to seems to be vastly misrepresenting Andrew Chael's contribution. Quote from the link:

> Andrew Chael wrote 850k out of the 900k lines of code. He was also the leader of the project. Michael D. Johnson wrote 12k lines of code. Chanchikwan wrote 5k lines of code. The woman? Only wrote 2.4k lines of code.

It's a little bit unbelievable that the author of this comment (/u/dragonballcell) nailed all of these fine-grained details (red herrings, perhaps?) and yet glossed over an incredibly important and superficial/trivial detail: that Andrew Chael did not "write 850k LOC", he generated hundreds of thousands of lines of data and committed them to the repo. Needless to say, I think this whole drama is incredibly pointless.

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

#439

Post by rjf72 » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 4:58 AM UTC

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?

People do the analog of this all the time in cases where they believe an individual is receiving disproportionate accolade for a team effort. It's extremely common in entrepreneurial situations. As a typical example, take Elon Musk. Whenever anybody directly attributed e.g. SpaceX's rockets to him, they'd often be quickly "corrected" by a rather large number of people. Elon himself would also go out of his way to emphasize that the things "he" had achieved were largely a product of the great people that made up his team.

I think people let their own personal biases destroy their impartiality. Replace her name with Musk, algorithm with science/engineering, and 'image of a black-hole' with reusable rocket. The article would (and does) read like something posted by a sycophantic fanboy. It wouldn't be doing him any favors, and certainly isn't doing her any favors. However, I also do not think this article is representative of her in any way, shape, or form.

For instance it tries to frame things in the most narcissistic way possible. They found one image posted where the developer stated, "Watching in disbelief as the first image I ever made of a black hole was in the process of being reconstructed." So she made that image. Not a team, not the project of a coordinate global effort, no - she made that image. Even the image framing itself is indicative. It's a tiny out of focus image of a laptop and a giant in focus image of her with an artificial pose. The article itself continues with a similar narrative in all the eye-catching spots such as the headline and image captions: "Katie Bouman designed an algorithm that made the image possible" "Katie Bouman: The woman behind the first black hole image", and so on.

But as mentioned, I doubt this is indicative of the developer herself. She's probably just being used by the media. She's attractive, young, and has the right genitalia = stories that'll get a million clicks and shares = $$$. When you actually read the very small number of quotes from her, they seem much more realistic and in stark contrast to the media sensationalism:

- "No one of us could've done it alone. It came together because of lots of different people from many different backgrounds."

- "We're a melting pot of astronomers, physicists, mathematicians and engineers, and that's what it took to achieve something once thought impossible".

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

#440

Post by rjf72 » Fri, Apr 12, 2019, 5:14 AM UTC

themarkn wrote: post #412

Not_a_pizza wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an asinine premise to say that the sex or race of a person makes an accomplishment more or less praiseworthy. If you really believe all are created equal, then you should be willing to praise equally for the same accomplishment regardless. If you don't, then what you are stating is that a sex or race is normally quite incompetent at such things and that it had to be a greater effort. Individuals do have differen…

Social, historical, and cultural factors undoubtedly make the level of effort required to be successful as a woman in tech or science spaces higher than the level of effort a man has to make for the same level of success (if you could control everything else). This can be true without any derogatory implication about the inherent capabilities of women generally. That you can't tell the difference astonishes me.

What do you base your first sentence on?

Unsurprisingly there is now research indicating that female candidates are now twice as likely to be chosen as equally qualified men for tenure track positions in university science departments. [1] And I'm sure my computer science class was no exception in that the generally ~three females in the class had about 90% of the rest of the class willing to do any and everything they possible could to help them, mostly being happy to just be able to spend time around a woman interested in CS. I have an inside track there as one of those three is now my wife!

I don't understand how people can think it would be harder to achieve as a female in STEM in the current environment (and neither does my wife for that matter). You get jobs easier, you get tenure tracks easier, you have enormous support networks, and so on. 30 years ago I'd agree with you, but I think we've long since radically overcorrected and, as you would say, that somebody can't see this does genuinely astonish me.

[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/1...