Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 547 posts

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

#71

Post by matthewmacleod »

zadwang wrote: post #53

THE woman? I am not sure how other women team members should feel about the article. Or even men. She may made important contribution but so did many others. Attributing the credit to a single person in such a large scale project is not fair to any team member. I am sure it is not her fault but whoever pushed to have BBC publish a story like this is hurting the science endeavor overall more than helping it.

This article is full of mentions about the fact that there was a team behind the work. Please stop being so obviously ridiculous.

There, she led the project, assisted by a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the MIT Haystack Observatory.

But Dr Bouman, now an assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences at the California Institute of Technology, insisted the team that helped her deserves equal credit.

The effort to capture the image, using telescopes in locations ranging from Antarctica to Chile, involved a team of more than 200 scientists.

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

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

#72

Post by govg »

killjoywashere wrote: post #49
govg wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what the idea behind posting this is? In a large scale project rarely does someone high up the command chain do any of the "grunt" work (i.e. programming). Also, by training she appears to be dealing more with theory than the actual implementation aspect of this all.

ok, so just so everyone is clear, the point between parent and grandparent is Andrew Chael seems to have written a hell of a lot more code than Katie Bouman, for a lot longer * achael 566 commits 850,275 ++ 131,044 -- * klbouman 90 commits 2,410 ++ 1,265 -- However, at least at the level of reading the commit messages, Katie's are pretty math heavy: "fixed bug in the fake briggs weighting" "starting to fix chirp prob…

True, but that need not be of high importance when assigning credit. Especially in projects that involve a lot of implementation, the high level algorithms and techniques are developed by someone who might be far removed from actually writing code, and that aspect is outsourced to someone much more competent at programming. A lot of PhD students / professors do not have the talent or have not developed the thought process to write complex code, simply because their focus has been on other things.

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

#73

Post by threeseed »

killjoywashere wrote: post #49
govg wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what the idea behind posting this is? In a large scale project rarely does someone high up the command chain do any of the "grunt" work (i.e. programming). Also, by training she appears to be dealing more with theory than the actual implementation aspect of this all.

ok, so just so everyone is clear, the point between parent and grandparent is Andrew Chael seems to have written a hell of a lot more code than Katie Bouman, for a lot longer * achael 566 commits 850,275 ++ 131,044 -- * klbouman 90 commits 2,410 ++ 1,265 -- However, at least at the level of reading the commit messages, Katie's are pretty math heavy: "fixed bug in the fake briggs weighting" "starting to fix chirp prob…

Since when was software development about who wrote the most code or did the most commits.

Do people like Linus deserve less credit now that he isn't the leader on the commit scoreboard ?

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

#74

Post by dexen »

matt4077 wrote: post #56
antt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm annoyed because of the breathless coverage. One would see less hyperbole if a dog had done the work. The worst thing is how soul crushing academia is. I left my physics PhD when I actually started talking to my colleagues and seeing my career trajectory. I bailed as soon as I realized I will be working until my 40s on the per hour pay of a fast food employee. I do not see why you want to push women to a field tha…

It's interesting how you are concerned about your own "career trajectory", yet for women you cite work/life balance and ability to have children. Edit: I just checked this comment from yesterday, where someone faulted Marissa Meyer for outsourcing her domestic work[0]. Funny story: it's also by you! But I guess it's all a coincidence. Plausible deniability, right? [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19620176

The keywords are "push" - as in, applying cultural pressure - and "require" - as in, "[work in academia] will pretty much require them to put off kids until their late 30s, if ever".

Presenting choices and opening avenues is a laudable thing. Pushing, via cultural means, is the opposite. Especially when certain inconvenient details are consistently glossed over.

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

#76

Post by antt »

matt4077 wrote: post #56
antt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm annoyed because of the breathless coverage. One would see less hyperbole if a dog had done the work. The worst thing is how soul crushing academia is. I left my physics PhD when I actually started talking to my colleagues and seeing my career trajectory. I bailed as soon as I realized I will be working until my 40s on the per hour pay of a fast food employee. I do not see why you want to push women to a field tha…

It's interesting how you are concerned about your own "career trajectory", yet for women you cite work/life balance and ability to have children. Edit: I just checked this comment from yesterday, where someone faulted Marissa Meyer for outsourcing her domestic work[0]. Funny story: it's also by you! But I guess it's all a coincidence. Plausible deniability, right? [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19620176

>I do not see why you want to push women to a field that pays starvation wages, has worse work/life balance than programming and will pretty much require them to put off kids until their late 30s, if ever.

Do you notice I put starvation wages first? Probably not, it would require reading what you're replying to. You're welcome to play again of course.

Might I direct you to [0] where in I compare male CEOs to chimps and come to the startling conclusion that not only are chimps better but the lack of cocaine habit makes them more cost effective too?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19620218

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

#77

Post by thecatspaw »

mhsabbagh wrote: post #60
Traster wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're conflating two things. There is an EU project to observe and measure the environment around a black hole. It is a project involving 200 people going back many years - as is stated explicitly in the article you are commenting on. Katie Bouman was the scientist in charge of the project of taking the enormous amount of data and translating that into an actual image. Not only does the article state that the larger…

No I am not, in order to create the image they observed the black hole for years, which is coming from the work of the people I linked to in my source, 200 people from 40 countries and all the other astronomers, being the team who just produced the image from the data is relatively smaller effort comparing to the overall work of all the people involved for years. I am not blaming her, I didn't say she's the one pushi…

Yes, the same way that people credit elon musk for tesla, or credit elon musk for spaceX. He didnt build those rockets himself either.

> This is not about celebrating those people, it's giving the main chunk of the credit to this person alone.

Because leading a large team of researches working on highly complicated work is respectfull work as well. Another team leader might have botched it and we wouldnt have the picture.

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

#79

Post by spyckie2 »

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 in the computer vision community. In this paper we present a novel Bayesian approach for VLBI image reconstruction. While other methods often require careful tuning and parameter selection for different types of data, our method (CHIRP) produces good results under different settings such as low SNR or extended emission. The success of our method is demonstrated on realistic synthetic experiments as well as publicly available real data. We present this problem in a way that is accessible to members of the community, and provide a dataset website (vlbiimaging.csail.mit.edu) that facilitates controlled comparisons across algorithms.

What strikes me as really amazing is the cross functional nature of these modern achievements. I did not realize that this image was created with statistical image models and a Bayesian approach.

Also, this link included -> http://vlbiimaging.csail.mit.edu/ introduces the field and offers a good explanation for those interested in learning more:

> Imaging distant celestial sources with high resolving power requires telescopes with prohibitively large diameters due to the inverse relationship between angular resolution and telescope diameter. However, by simultaneously collecting data from an array of telescopes located around the Earth, it is possible to emulate samples from a single telescope with a diameter equal to the maximum distance between telescopes in the array. Using multiple telescopes in this manner is referred to as very long baseline interferometry (VLBI).

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

#80

Post by dunslandsboo »

dalemyers wrote: post #44

I've read comments on Hacker News for many years, often finding them a useful source of additional information and insight into details from whatever the linked piece is. Sometimes these threads are full of only subtly veiled hatred and leave me with a feeling of disgust. This thread is one of those. There have been countless threads over the years where a man gets the credit for something a team has worked on and th…

Why do you want to change the behaviour of women regarding their choice of study field?
Post reply on HN