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

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47891902

by tigerlily • 7 years ago

889 369 7 years ago

bbc.com

romanovcode• 7 years ago

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.

melling3• 7 years ago

“ 29-year-old computer scientist”

She’s not an astronomer?

sohkamyung• 7 years ago

Best to see her bio [1]:

I am a postdoctoral fellow with the Event Horizon Telescope and will be an Assistant Professor in the CMS department at Caltech beginning in 2019.

[1] https://people.csail.mit.edu/klbouman/

inflatableDodo4• 7 years ago

Maybe not on paper, but she is definitely an astronomer.

Canada• 7 years ago

She is definitely not an astronomer. A lot of highly specialized and talented people who aren't astronomers or physicists are are critical to the success of big science projects.

dmurray• 7 years ago

Astronomy is about computers to the same extent that computer science is about telescopes, as I think Dijkstra said.

yoz-y• 7 years ago

hidden figures? eerily similar

melling3• 7 years ago

She is getting a lot of press:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/computer-scientists-play-key-ro...

hjk05• 7 years ago

The downvotes are typical in gender politics threads. There are two fronts aggressively arguing in a “you are either with us or against us fashion”

For the people questioning if she’s receiving unfair attention because of her gender they view you comment as an attack on the establishment ala: “How dare they exclude her!? Is it just because she’s a woman?” And downvote you. For the people arguing that her media coverage is being unfairly criticized because she’s a woman they view your question as an attack on the assertion that she deserves the attention so they downvote you.

In either case I think it’s interesting to ask why the proclaimed “woman behind the image” wasn’t there for the unvailing of the image.

coryfklein• 7 years ago

This is very curious - the OP is functioning like a Rorschach for HN readers.

ilarum3• 7 years ago

Relevant repository - https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging

darkpuma• 7 years ago

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.

govg3• 7 years ago

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.

ilarum3• 7 years ago

Number of lines is not an indicator of contribution. The reason I posted this repo was so that folks curious about the programming behind this science could have their fill. I am just happy to see an academic project using good version control practices released under a proper license.

telesilla7• 7 years ago

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?

black_puppydog2• 7 years ago

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.

pbhjpbhj3• 7 years ago

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?

walrus01• 7 years ago

from april 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIvezCVcsYs

mpfundstein• 7 years ago

Is it me or is the article written like for 5 year olds? It feels like I am reading a child book.

However, this is such a great achievement. Would be awesome to learn more about the algorithm.

inflatableDodo4• 7 years ago

Welcome to 99% of the BBC's science output. Outside of Radio4, it has become a barren wasteland where no numbers can increment.

MultusSalus• 7 years ago

As I understand it that’s how articles look when a major organisation establishes SEO as a primary metric.

sajib3• 7 years ago

Because it is. If it reads like a child book they did a great job. If you studied journalism you’d know making it as easy as possible for all audiences is a key skill each journalist needs to have. It’s not a science journal that it needs to be full of jargon. It’s meant for general audience and they did a great job. If you want a hard piece go read the journal papers that got published.

growlist• 7 years ago

It's called dumbing down.

inflatableDodo4• 7 years ago

There are degrees of this. If you compare science reporting against the mainstream financial news it is like chalk and cheese. If the numbers represent money, technical jargon is everywhere, if the subject is scientific, even the numbers are considered scary, never mind a technical discussion around them.

Cthulhu_• 7 years ago

Why is that a bad thing? One of the main drivers of people getting into STEM is and has always been popular science - taking a complicated subject like this project, or gravitational waves, or the LHC etc, and describing it in a language that everyone can understand. And if you can understand it, there's a higher chance it interests you, which will lead to digging some more, etc etc etc.

amrrs2• 7 years ago

I'm not biased anyway but thinking Is it fair to attribute this entire thing to one person leaving out the team of collaborators? Doesn't it sound like what happens with Jobsism?

Edit: While I'm being rapidly downvoted, I'd like to clarify that I didn't mean to demean this because it's a female nor any of the feat this research has achieved. My point was only about why is it reported as if individual feat while many of such things are a strong team work.

For some other questions - will you say the same about Elon musk - of course i've argued this among my peers and that's exactly why I called it similar to `Jobsism`

To Quote: Another recent incident, While AI Godfathers got Turing award, many questioned why this person hasn't got and that person hasn't got.

My idea for this comment was a constructive discussion but it took a different spin that my comment is against this woman which definitely not my intention.

klohto• 7 years ago

~I feel bad for the team. I would rather see the whole team praised for the success not just one person that fits the narrative "women in tech".~

People I right, I made an assumption based on the title and not the content.

threeseed7• 7 years ago

Nobody is claiming it is a one person effort. Nobody.

And whilst she is getting more attention it has not come at the expense of anyone else.

And you wonder why women hate to work in IT with comments like yours where you've dismissed her accomplishments simply because she is a "women in tech".

wastedhours• 7 years ago

"Elon Musk single handedly saves the world with electric cars and revolutionises spaces travel"

The media have highlighted the lead, she credits the team, and the article outlines the numbers who worked on it.

govg3• 7 years ago

It's a bit of both - she was the lead behind the algorithm used to process the data, so she rightly deserves credit for that aspect (being the first to do something always gets the credit in the research community). At the same time, it's disingenuous to say it would have been impossible without her, there were multiple competing methods that could have pulled this off, and there were large parts of this achievement that had nothing to do with computational photography research (the astronomy / radio physicists teams).

Tade0• 7 years ago

Yes, and she's the first to acknowledge this:

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1021332602552304...

robaato• 7 years ago

From article: 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."

realradicalwash4• 7 years ago

i don't think the criticism of "jobsism" is directed at her, but rather at media outlets who are spinning the story this way.

throwaway_m73• 7 years ago

Everyone, from government to education to tech companies really, really, really want more women in STEM. A smart, photogenic woman making a contribution is the real story because it fits that narrative. I don't mean to take away from her contributions and I'm not making value judgments, that's just how I see it.

Traster• 7 years ago

I'm not sure this will get the suitably nuanced discussion it should on Hacker News, but there's a whole school of discussion about 'Great man theory' view of history.

glangdale3• 7 years ago

Focus on an academic superstar at the expense of their team - or a big 'team lead' at a place like Google or Facebook is far from remarkable. Any particular reason that this story stands out for you?

matt40772• 7 years ago

It's a scientific feat that's ranked in the top 50 HN stories of all time, yet you somehow feel a profile of the central figure is somehow inappropriate?

How would you rate "Meet Robert Oppenheimer, father of the bomb"?

I'd also love anyone to point me to any similar discussion on Elon Musk and one of his companies.

amrrs2• 7 years ago

Clarity: I definitely didn't mean to demean her effort or profile. I'm just pointing out how media outlets are reporting this feat.

morrbo• 7 years ago

I see a lot of mention on various forums about the storage they used (5pb) but am just wondering if anyone know what kind of backend they used to house this? From what I saw there were too many disks - in the wrong type of enclosure - to be running on a single server, which suggests multiple physical servers. I've seen a prior CERN research paper on gluster and ceph (iirc) and am just wondering if anyone in the know could enlighten me?

njepa6• 7 years ago

Seems like what you are seeing on the image of the drives is part of this: https://www.haystack.mit.edu/tech/vlbi/mark6/index.html

Found it through this pdf: https://fskbhe1.puk.ac.za/people/mboett/Texas2017/Doeleman.p...

princekolt• 7 years ago

I read yesterday they were using a bunch of servers connected with a 40Gbps network link. I'll try to find the source.

andrelaszlo• 7 years ago

The WaPo article also references a few of the interesting issues they had:

"Then they spent the two years parsing literal truckloads of data, some of which had to be shipped on hard drives from the South Pole and defrosted outside a supercomputer facility at MIT."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/04/10/see-black-...

I'd love to read more about this if anyone has an article with more details.

melling3• 7 years ago

Katie gave a TED talk:

https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs

anc84• 7 years ago

You mean Bouman?

stronglikedan• 7 years ago

Same person.

CydeWeys12• 7 years ago

... you never referred to someone by their first name in informal talk??

sorenjan• 7 years ago

It's a TEDx talk. In this case it's an interesting one by an expert in her field, but TEDx have a lot lower demands for participating, so try to keep the distinction clear.

rohan1024• 7 years ago

It might have been on TEDx but now it's on TED YouTube channel.

CydeWeys12• 7 years ago

I don't see TEDx anywhere on that.

tendencydriven• 7 years ago

Does it really matter if its a TEDx or TED talk? It just appears like you're trying to diminish her achievements for literally no gain.

dennisgorelik4• 7 years ago

It is an interesting presentation, but I do NOT understand Katie's explanation about how they were going to minimize the bias [to "see" already predicted black hole visualization] while creatively interpreting inputs from sparsely placed telescopes around the earth.

Do you understand Katie's explanation?

cheekybillberry3• 7 years ago

I wondered this as well. It seems like a significant problem when doing this sort of thing.

QuotedForTruth5• 7 years ago

Disclaimer: this is based on watching the talk and some basic machine learning knowledge. Im no expert.

They have a sparse set of data that is part of an image. They have trained a model to look at the sparse set and make an educated guess about what the full image looks like. They do this by feeding it full images.

The full images you feed into the model thus have an effect on the final image generated. In order to see how large that effect is, they trained different versions of the model with different sets of complete images. Some were images of what we thought a black hole looked like. There is potential that this heavily influences the model and ensures that the output looks like what we expect it to, even if that isnt actually true.

They also trained the model with non-blackhole images. Since the output of the model was approximately the same, this indicates that the resulting output picture doesnt look like what we think a black hole looks like just because it was trained with black hole images. It likely really looks like that.

The model doesn't need to be told what a black hole looks like. The sparse measurements combined with knowledge of how sparse data can be combined to form a generic image is enough. The model learned that the sparse data is not likely pure noise, instead there are shapes and lines and gradients that relate the sparse data points to each other.

Her analogy of sketch artists is good. If you have a functionally complete description and give it to 3 sketch artists from different cultures who are used to different looking people, they will still draw the same person. However if your description isnt actually detailed enough, their sketches will significantly differ as they use their existing knowledge and bias to fill in the gaps with what they think is likely.

MagicPropmaker2• 7 years ago

I had the same issue. It seemed like with many plausible solutions, there is some bias in the image. I agree there are some reasonable constraints, like it should be energetic stuff in a sphere around a dark sphere, but how many solutions would have fit that criteria?

distant_hat• 7 years ago

If you want to understand that, do not listen to TED talks. They have a terrible format and are designed to make people feel smart rather than impart knowledge.

dalemyers• 7 years ago

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 there is practically never any comments about this. For once a woman gets credit and this thread is full of people complaining that there was an entire team.

Yes, there was a team, but that doesn't matter. For once a woman is getting credit for the great work they've done and this should be applauded. Stories like this help bring more women into STEM fields. Anyone who is complaining about the lack of fairness in this is making themselves look ignorant by ignoring the last thousand years of scientific progress.

threeseed7• 7 years ago

It's the same on Reddit.

The sheer toxicity of many of the comments is something I haven't seen for a long time. They really hate that a women is getting credit and that others aren't getting the same level of attention.

I wonder how those same people think about Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs etc. They had huge teams behind them as well.

vonseel• 7 years ago

Dumb attitude.

For every extraordinarily recognized academic/professional person, there’s always going to be many times more people who are never publicly recognized for their achievements.

Maybe they fly under the radar, maybe they picked the wrong subject to focus on or industry for career, maybe their timing is bad, maybe there’s nothing wrong with them.

I’m proud of this (stranger to me) girl for accomplishing something so large at this age. Being about the same age, I’m not jealous - but it is one more reminder that somewhere along the line my record-player skipped a few years. My 20s disappeared too quickly, or maybe I was focused on the wrong things (work) instead of passion.

aphextim• 7 years ago

https://files.catbox.moe/tejoch.png

hlurhhh3• 7 years ago

Yeah I'm reading all these comments and I hope these people are NOT the sames ones asking why more girls/women don't get into tech, because I've been a programmer for > 8 years and shit like this is off putting to me, a grown ass woman.

simias• 7 years ago

In my experience this is common for this type of news about "prodigies" on HN. I remember the same types of reactions a few years ago about an article about a child who made the headlines (it even prompted a response by pg IIRC). Was it Malala? I can't remember.

I think it's just that many people feel threatened or inadequate when they (naturally) compare themselves to these people. It's tempting to put them down so that we feel better about ourselves. I think most of us here on HN like to think that we're clever but when people like Katie Bouman get under the spotlight suddenly most of us realize that we're not such hot shots after all.

It's probably worse when it's a woman/child/minority/... because it gives us the convenient excuse of "this is probably a PR stunt" to dismiss them. It's lazy and it's intellectually dishonest but it's also very human unfortunately.

moomin• 7 years ago

Indeed, one of the most poisonous things going on in Hollywood/TV right now is writers and actors getting told they didn't get the job because "diversity is hot right now" or some similar rubbish. It reinforces the idea that "the best" people should get the job (not the best people for the job) whilst simultaneously implying that "diverse" people are not "the best".

This leads to people getting rejected thinking it's part of some culture war, when the truth is that most people get rejected, some of those people would have been brilliant in the role they got rejected for and it's exactly the same brutal industry that it was in the 1980s.

njepa6• 7 years ago

I would hope that isn't it. While her trajectory might be uncommon it isn't abnormal. This is the kind of thing you are supposed to do with a PhD from MIT.

jsgo• 7 years ago

the closest one that comes to mind is the teenager who was credited with that article summarizing algorithm that I think Yahoo or someone ended up buying. My memory is pretty hazy on it, but in that case it seemed more like a group of researchers actually made it and I'm not 100% certain how he was connected. I remember that one getting a bit of "hey, what a second" kind of comments about it.

I think in this particular case, I have no problem with it. One, she obviously had a big part in it. Maybe it is blow back because they feel a picture of the inside of a black hole isn't a big deal and people are making it into something big? In my opinion, it is. I remember middle school teachers almost scoffing at the idea of a picture of a black hole and yet, 25 years later, here we are. Regardless, she in her twenties has generated something that researchers spend a lifetime trying to find so kudos to her. I'm sure there is a certain gendered element to it in both cases (for and against) and it'd probably be naive to think there wasn't.

Even if this were a smaller aspect of what these researchers were aiming for, I'd love to see a documentary series on what various team members worked on (and in her case, discovered). An image generated by radio waves and she (maybe with others?) was able to construct an image out of that? That's impressive. Probably not, but I'd be curious if this kind of thing could be localized in a way that it could be the "sound to visual model" element of a system so that blind people could make out the world a bit more directly (obviously, there'd need to be a means for them to consume said model. All of this is way above me and my pay grade).

ummonk3• 7 years ago

In my experience this is common for this type of news about "prodigies" on HN. I remember the same types of reactions a few years ago about an article about a child who made the headlines (it even prompted a response by pg IIRC). Was it Malala? I can't remember.

For an example of this that involves a male, the media has been hyping the Ocean Cleanup project because it provides them with a great prodigy story, but people on HN have been rightly pushing back against its merits.

bubblewrap6• 7 years ago

Can you point to some of those threads (men getting credit)?

threeseed7• 7 years ago

Search for Elon Musk.

warp_factor• 7 years ago

I think those comments try to react to the fact that this news got overblown because the researcher is a very talented woman.

She definitely did something amazing and unfortunately it turned political because it fits the narrative that some people love to push currently.

I'm not a fan of the liberal agenda of positive//negative discrimination. I really believe that it is making everyone worse off, especially women that are being treated like little kids that need to be shown the correct path.

threeseed7• 7 years ago

Nobody is aiming to treat women like little kids.

We just want to show that you if you accomplish something in tech you aren't going to be diminished or dismissed simply because you're a woman.

roguecoder16• 7 years ago

I disagree with the premise that it is possible to overblow the news about a picture of a black hole. What kind of crappy nerd thinks science is getting too much press!?!!

nprateem• 7 years ago

Stories like this help bring more women into STEM fields

How do you know?

telesilla7• 7 years ago

One of the reasons I felt isolated in STEM 20 years ago was the very lack of role models. That's changing and I know for a fact, as I interact with young women, that seeing another woman in action as a professional in STEM helps them feel there is a place for them. It definitely fosters a sense of encouragement to pursue higher dreams.

cwal37• 7 years ago

This paper[1] gets at it for one.

From the abstract:

" Consistent with the importance of exposure effects in career selection, women and disadvantaged youth are as underrepresented among high-impact inventors as they are among inventors as a whole. These findings suggest that there are many “lost Einsteins”—individuals who would have had highly impactful inventions had they been exposed to innovation in childhood—especially among women, minorities, and children from low-income families."

[1] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/134/2/647/5218...

dunslandsboo2• 7 years ago

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

juliendorra• 7 years ago

You misunderstood. We want any person, women and young girls included, to be able to pursue a career path, if they have even the faintest desire of it, without self-censorship, negative remarks, feeling out of place, their vocation and/or skills being continuously challenged randomly, or having to cope with various forms of harassment. If you build an environment that allow that, women presence in the field surge. And then you see retrospectively that many women wanted to try this field, but it was really the field that didn’t want women to try. Because, as you will probably agree, desire for a career is not natural destiny, it’s the result of many factors including avoiding being hurt.

frostburg2• 7 years ago

Optimal application of talent. The concept of "choice" isn't very consistent, especially when applied to populations instead of individuals.

koalala• 7 years ago

To add to this, another important question to ask is: what kind of equality, in general, do you want? Do you want equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? They are mutually exclusive.

mansoor_• 7 years ago

I agree with your general sentiment but two comments:

1) Look back at any physic journal for similar stories of experimental success (example gravitational waves), you won't find news stories of focus pieces on a single team member because it is a COLLABORATIVE effort. The only cases were single people get recognition is for theorists like Prof Higgs, Hawkings etc, but not for the individual experimentalists at the LHC or other astronomical projects.

2) The idea of focussing on a single team member is a technique for creating a clear narrative that readers can follow. The story would get less interest if you were told about the live and works of all of the team members.

It's not all hate :)

shaki-dora• 7 years ago

Craig Venter

kakarot3• 7 years ago

Hacker News isn't some monolithic community. Each time, you're seeing different people express their opinions. There's no hypocrisy there.

I think it's friggin awesome to see women in science. But even if Bouman was male I would still be cautious of attributing so much of an international collaboration to one person in the form of "Meet the _____ behind the first black hole image". That phrasing disregards too much hard work. I see no reason to offer Bouman special treatment in this regard at the expense of others solely because of her gender. That isn't equality.

soVeryTired2• 7 years ago

I don't really think she's getting special treatment because of her gender though. I think she's in the spotlight because:

1/ She led the team and was first author on the image reconstruction paper

2/ She gave a Ted talk on the topic a while back

3/ There's a brilliant photo of her initial reaction to the image that captures the excitement of scientific discovery circulating on the internet

scraft• 7 years ago

I am glad she got credit and I am glad in that respect she got treated equally. I am a little sad that her gender is a 'thing', as in I think I have seen more comments on various news site comments, social media, etc. that are quick to specifically point out she is a woman. I get they are trying to be positive, but it also has this weird reverse side where it is like "An amazing feat in STEM has been achieved, but you better brace yourself, it wasn't done by a man, it was done by a woman! A real living woman!". I understand the argument of needing to make a shout about it to help encourage more women into the field and to try to push against previous years of women not being in the limelight for work like this. But at the same point, every time it is specifically called out, it feels like something that is (obviously) only done for a woman, so therefore it is treating the achievement differently than if a man had achieved it.

Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Anyway, I do not want to sidetrack from this amazing achievement.

ioulian• 7 years ago

Yeah, the most important fact for the humanity that they did it, they created the first image of a black hole, is it a man, a woman, a child, a muslim, a white man, what does it even matter?

I kinda hate the recent trend to focus more on gender or race if somebody achieves anything. Look what Morgan Freeman said about racism [0]. Is it really important that she is a woman? Do people think a lot of women can't achieve these things? And if 1 woman achieved this, all women are better than men? Do everybody just expect men to be smarter and if they do something outstanding it's ok, but when a woman does it, it's extraordinary... Why focus so much on this?

In discussions like this we should really focus on the person (and also the team behind her/him, I doubt she could do it alone without the team), not the gender or race or whatever.

I really hope this positive discrimination hype dies out, it doesn't help anybody. Let the best person for the job get the job.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3cGfrExozQ

gdepuydt• 7 years ago

Spot on.

roguecoder16• 7 years ago

If a headline said “the man who discovered the cure” you wouldn’t think they were making a big deal out of his gender. You only see it as being attention-seeking because you are experiencing cognitive dissonance, and you are blaming it on their language instead of your mental patterns.

hurryskurry4• 7 years ago

In much of STEM women are basically at parity. With computer science, and engineering being obvious exceptions. Further there is a study which has shown that in countries with greater gender equality women choose STEM occupations less. Overall women get more graduate degrees than men and have been for the last ten years.

glangdale3• 7 years ago

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 many people suddenly desperately concerned that the Little People get a mention, and I'm at least part-way convinced that gender (and maybe youth? she's 29...) has a good deal to do with it (apparently the other thing that triggers the "harrumph, what about the team" crowd are stories about child prodigies, according to another thread).

roguecoder16• 7 years ago

“Women and children” is a phrase for a reason: men tend to treat both patronizingly, rather than identifying with them.

Imagine you had just had your invention create a picture of a black hole, you wrote the paper where you were the first author describing this and then the press came knocking: would you be as gracious as she has been? Or would you feel like the fucking rockstar you would, in fact, be?

throwAway572683• 7 years ago

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 my rough count, led by Drs. Michael Johnson and Kazunori Akiyama) is itself one part of the analysis group, which has three other working groups, and then the analysis group is one of a half dozen larger groups in the EHT project which produced this result.

So it's not a case of the project lead being presented as the face of the project, which is par for the course in academia (and the outside world). It is a postdoc one level above the grad students who form the least-senior rung of the project, and many levels from the top suddenly being misleadingly presented as the key figure in a major result.

Imagine you worked on a small team of a couple of postdocs and a few grad students near the bottom of a hierarchy of teams involving hundreds of people, and then came in one day and your colleague and co-lead at the same level as you was suddenly presented as the face and key contributor for not only your small slice of things, not even the larger component to which the slice belongs, but the entire project?

You'd probably be pretty happy for them, but also confused as to why the many people with the actual role as overall group leaders or the project leaders aren't mentioned. One might also note how distant the general public is from the machinations of the academic world that no one is asking how a 20-something CS postdoc ended up leading a multinational astronomy project involving top faculty from top institutions? In terms of notability and improbability, that would probably be a bigger story than any image produced by the group!

Explaining her actual position and contribution is not in any way to detract from her contributions: only to clarify the record in the face of an onslaught of misleading media articles, which seemed to largely sourced (transitively) from a few misleading tweets, themselves triggered by a viral image.

On top of that, none of this is doing Dr. Bouman any favors. Although they are mostly silent, no one in the EHT project is confused about her role, and none of the other people in her faculty or almost anyone else who matters will be under any misconception despite the headlines. If anything, academia is even more picky than other fields when it comes to attribution, so any type of misplaced credit can be viewed very negatively and can attach itself to a person indefinitely. Now she hasn't invited this or propagated this story, so one should consider her a blameless victim here: but not everyone in a position to care will necessarily remember that subtlety.

CydeWeys12• 7 years ago

Yeah, this comment section is really bad.

As someone who's been interested in astronomy my entire life, and considered getting a degree in it but only ended up with a minor since I sensibly prioritized CS and wanted to graduate in four years, this is an awesome, amazing, really clever accomplishment. And yet many of the comments here are just so negative, either outright sexist, picking nits and trying to argue that it isn't a big breakthrough or anything, or going through code contributions line-by-line trying to establish that really someone else had more to do with it.

All I know is, she must be insanely intelligent and hard-working. What an awesome PhD project, and at MIT no less!, an institution that I have enormous respect for and that I somewhat identify with because my dad attended and I've been there for many events. I'm jealous. This would've been the exact kind of thing I'd have gone into in astronomy for (because of my background in programming) had I seriously pursued it, but I know I'm just not diligent enough to have seen it through. And being honest, I didn't apply myself well enough in undergrad to have gotten good enough grades to get into a good grad school.

It sucks that so many people jump into "push people down" mode instead of "life people up" mode in these kinds of situations rather, because this is an amazing scientific accomplishment that deserves celebrating. One of the PIs in one of the press conferences said that this was the most important accomplishment in astronomy since 2014 [when Rosetta landed a probe on a comet], and I tend to agree. It's not just about this one image, but about establishing the feasibility of a virtual planet-sized radio telescope that is capable of imaging lots more than just black holes. A lot more discoveries are likely to come out of this technique, and guess who came up with the algorithm to make sense of all those petabytes of data?

cheekybillberry3• 7 years ago

I think this might be one of those cases where we just have to agree to disagree, but I, well, disagree with the premise that the reaction to men is any different on this point.

There are regularly posts here linking to articles about misattribution of credit in science and technology, the problem with the "great man theory," laments about the role of social media in creating hype, and there are plenty of male figures discussed here who engender bitter discussions about how credit should be assigned. I honestly don't see any difference between this discussion and any other discussion. I seem to remember similar discussions emerging about discovery of the Meltdown and Spectre hardware vulnerabilities, and many other physics discoveries involving large teams of researchers, just to take a few examples.

The way credit is assigned in science is a significant moral crisis in my opinion (as it is in work in general; cf. rampant income inequality), and it really doesn't matter what the genders of the individuals involved are. Strangely enough, I think attention is being paid to this argument here because of her gender. It's one of these unfortunate circumstances where I think two competing ethical goals are kind of conflicting, one being the better representation of women and minorities in science, the other being lack of fair representation for all in credit.

ummonk3• 7 years ago

Yeah, these arguments happen all the time, with plenty of male figures as well.

black-tea3• 7 years ago

Really? You could easily find comments on here talking about how Steve Jobs wasn't really the genius at Apple, but rather it was Steve Wozniak. We do care who really did it. Always.

fzeroracer• 7 years ago

HN seems to have an unfortunate problem where any time women are promoted in tech it creates incredibly toxic threads with lots of thrashing and gnashing about how unfair it is.

One needs to just look at another large thread that generated controversy to get an idea of the growing trend [1].

Which means one has to ask themselves: Is HN cultivating an environment that's only going to get worse? And personally, I think the answer would be yes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19464269

hgannita2• 7 years ago

It doesn't really work like this. It's a team of scientists that make these contributions, not one person.

threeseed7• 7 years ago

And nobody is saying that it was done by one person.

It specifically lists the teams in the article.

zadwang• 7 years ago

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.

simonh• 7 years ago

We see articles about 'the man behind' stuff all the time. Just go to Google News and search for 'the man behind', you'll see pages and pages of them just for the last few weeks. In fact, check out articles with 'the man behind' in the title on HN[0]. It's a common shorthand which I think most of us recognise as not necessarily disrespectful to a team they might have lead.

[0]https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%27the%20man%20behind%27&sort=...

But uh oh, now there's a woman behind something all of a sudden it's a huge problem and the thread is packed with complaints about it. I wonder why that is?

threeseed7• 7 years ago

Congratulations. You didn't even bother to read one sentence beyond the headline.

"A 29-year-old computer scientist has earned plaudits worldwide for helping develop the algorithm"

Or even a few sentences in:

"There, she led the project, assisted by a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory .."

But hey who needs to read articles when you can jump to conclusions and surface your clear biases.

matthewmacleod• 7 years ago

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."

telesilla7• 7 years ago

Congratulations Katie! It's beautiful to see something that I hoped would be real, especially after seeing Interstellar's gorgeous rendition. And may you inspire hundreds of thousands of girls to enter the fields of science and technology.

spyckie2• 7 years ago

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).

wallace_f4• 7 years ago

large diameters due to the inverse relationship between angular resolution and telescope diameter.

Not trained in this field, but this reads like a certain mistype. Shouldn't resolution increase with telescope diameter?

blattimwind• 7 years ago

No. Angular resolution is essentially the angular distance between two points that are still resolved as separate points. So if your resolution increases, angular resolution decreases, because you can resolve two points that are closer together.

chickenmonkey• 7 years ago

I'm not sure, but from a class I'm taking right now, I have a faint inkling that the lesser light you let in, the more resolution you have i.e the more you're able to distinguish between two close together objects.

shalmanese• 7 years ago

Angular resolution is the smallest angle that can be resolved by a telescope. Small angular resolution produces high resolution images.

doctoboggan• 7 years ago

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

matt40772• 7 years ago

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 does or does not deserve praise.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15250349

kypro• 7 years ago

This is why I'd wish we stopped seeing people's individual achievements in relation to the groups they belong to. I've noticed recently whenever a girl or black guy achieves anything some people (often rightly) become suspicious that their achievements are being exaggerated or are due to quotas or affirmative action. And that robs the individual of the credit they deserve.

kgwgk• 7 years ago

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.

ralfd• 7 years ago

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.

roguecoder16• 7 years ago

Without her, this wouldn’t exist.

antt• 7 years ago

Top post:

It's a miserable language, full of unexpected behaviors and badly designed features.

I agree. That no one is tearing apart the horribly written python in the git repo is extremely sexist.

Holy shit, you're using comments as version control, the 70s called and what their code practices back.

Oh my god, did you even read the thread? It gets better with each post:

I haven't met a single person who likes PowerShell. It's perhaps the textbook example of ugly design that looks technically consistent but utterly unfriendly and mind bogglingly verbose. [...] The designers of this thing should have been demoted, let alone making them "Distinguished Engineer".
PowerShell is one of the few bits of software which has actually made me throw a computer in anger. The idea has potential but the implementation is just bad.

And they go on and on.

kaitai2• 7 years ago

At least they're talking about PowerShell rather than gender!

roguecoder16• 7 years ago

Also not one person complained about how the journalist was making Such A Big Deal out of his gender and overblowig his accomplishments by using the word “man”.

founderling3• 7 years ago

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 constellations that seem distorted because of black holes.

A quick googling brings up this article from 2014 for example:

https://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/12/tech/black-hole-nasa-nust....

"Black hole bends light, space, time -- and NASA's NuSTAR can see it all unfold"

bubblewrap6• 7 years ago

Must admit, I feel kind of the same. It's also probably more of an artistic rendering than a photograph in the classical sense.

zymhan• 7 years ago

Humans can only see a tiny sliver of the enormous Electromagnetic spectrum. Just because it's not a photograph in visible light doesn't mean it's not our best rendering of EM data and what that would look like to us if it was in the visible spectrum.

We do the same thing with digital cameras, X-rays, MRI, etc.

yetihehe• 7 years ago

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

founderling3• 7 years ago

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." :)

wycy• 7 years ago

It seems like a valid question. We're also told that a black hole isn't visible, and we're told that this image is reconstructed from sensor data. Whether or not it's really fair to consider it a "photograph" of a black hole boils down to exactly how much artistic license is taken in reconstructing the sensor data. Not knowing how much of this is artistic license, I'm willing to take the scientists at their word, but to ask the question doesn't seem like a nitpick.

EDIT: In Dr Bouman's TED talk, she notes that there are an infinite number of ways the sensor data could be constructed into an image, and that they were looking for a construction that looks like what they expect things in our universe look like. So, there's some ambiguity in the definition of "photograph"

ummonk3• 7 years ago

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", more of a "AI artist rendition".

godelmachine• 7 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Bouman

Waterluvian• 7 years ago

So is the 200 people team a frontrunner for the Nobel Prize in Physics?

billfruit2• 7 years ago

Was making a photographic image the main aim of the project? Or is the image just a byproduct?

I mean hard to imagine such a large project being taken up, for the benefit of public being able to see a picture of the black hole.

Would this kind of multi telescope effort be capable of producing surface images of extra solar planets for example?

CydeWeys12• 7 years ago

It wasn't a photographic image (they're using radio waves, not visible light). This is a visual representation of the radio waves.

And yes, this is one way of representing the data. I'm not sure exactly what your question is though, as actually getting this data is really important to confirm a variety of theories and also to potentially open up new avenues for investigation. And this cost orders of magnitude less than Hubble, whose purpose was also to generate photographs, seeing as how they simply connected together existing radio telescopes.

The point was to demonstrate that this technique is feasible. Now they can use it to image all sorts of other stuff and learn lots more.

billfruit2• 7 years ago

Question is, what did the project aim to achieve? Take a picture of the black hole?

Or gather data that will help us study blackholes?

Because the press is largely focusing on the picture and not telling much else detail.

And is Boumans contributions to do with the making of this image?

wallace_f4• 7 years ago

The point was to demonstrate that this technique is feasible.

Is it wrong to say this is a logical improvement, extension of radio interferometry?

heartbreak• 7 years ago

This is a visual representation of the radio waves

So a photograph.

dvtrn6• 7 years ago

Title ought to reflect the fact that this woman has a doctorate from MIT and should rightfully be addressed as Dr. Katie Bouman.

ominous• 7 years ago

Her name is Katie Bouman. She can also be addressed as Dr. Katie Bouman.

elliotec• 7 years ago

She should be referred by her proper title. Can and should.

dvtrn6• 7 years ago

Sure.

But in a published headline, one ought to be addressed by their formal title.

Differences exist between casual conversation and publication. A distinction I shouldn’t have to point out as one that exists.

MagicPropmaker2• 7 years ago

The policy on Hacker News, according to their guidelines, is they use the original article title, unless there's a good reason to change it.

amai• 7 years ago

She also has a newer paper, which gives a glimpse on what the people of EHT are up next:

Reconstructing Video from Interferometric Measurements of Time-Varying Sources https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.01357

So maybe we will also see a video of a black hole, soon.

brootstrap• 7 years ago

I just want to see what she named her jupyter notebook. 'black_hole_v4_new_FINAL.ipynb'

gonational• 7 years ago

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.

realradicalwash4• 7 years ago

Her story is trully inspiring! She seems like a really likable person, has been hard working, with great results, making a major contribution. The photo with her and the hard drives is amazing and I am sure she will inspire many to enter science.

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. -- But that is not the case. Arguably, there are others who have contributed as much if not more. This is what makes me somewhat feel that this focus on her is not quite fair.

Coverage in mainland Europe has been different so far: Prof Falcke gets a lot of credit for the image/project. Falcke is heading one of the major teams that contributed to the project. In fact, many here attribute the conception of the project to him. But how many in the English speaking sphere have heard or will ever hear about Falcke? Why is that?

My personal guess is that the reason for this is: 1) The Anglo-american media were looking for inspiring EHT scientists from the English-speaking world. 2) Bouman fit that description best.

So, imv, something like "The inspiring story of Katie Bouman" and some credit to some of the other major figures like Falcke would have been fairer.

yeahitslikethat• 7 years ago

No one would read that story. No one knows Katie Bouman. Everyone knows the blackhole.

You're thinking like a programmer. Think not like a programmer and then explain why the original headline is better.

Why was the article written?

SmellyGeekBoy• 7 years ago

This is what makes me somewhat feel that this focus on her is not quite fair.

Thought experiment: if you saw an article titled "Jony Ive: The Man Behind The iPhone" would you be commenting on how unfair it is to single him out? After all, he just designed the thing, a huge team of people built the software and the hardware that actually made it possible.

realradicalwash4• 7 years ago

this is hard to say, tbh.

first: by alluding to Ive, you insert a gender component. i don't want to make this about gender - which is what happened itt. as mentioned, i think the difference in focus is because of geo-cultural reasons. another piece of evidence for this hypothesis comes from the following: over here, the EU also gets a lot of praise for providing the main chunk of the funding for the project. a quick check tells me that this detail is often omitted in US articles about the project. also, a note on myself: i work in a field where the majority of people are female. so is my boss. her work is great and i love working here. at the same time, i am aware that the bar to get here was higher for my female colleagues than it is for men. also, i see the glass ceiling having an effect on the careers of my sisters and my female friends. and i am painfully aware of the struggles that my mum and other women of her generation had/have to go through. so i consider myself a feminist, in the sense that i believe that we should have full equality and that we do not have it yet.

second: think iphone, i think jobs. so what "Jony Ive: The Man Behind The iPhone" would imply to me is that Ive is _the one person_ that had the biggest impact on the development of the iphone. i don't know enough about Ive to evaluate this. but here's the thing: if it turned out that another person contributed as much if not more than Ive, then i'd say: hey, it's nice that the article introduces Ive and gives him some credit, but let's not exaggerate and let's not forget about the other people who have also greatly contributed to the project.

edit: to clarify: i find it hard to say, because it's somewhat hypothetical. i truly hope for myself that i would react the same way / that gender has no impact on my thought process.

devoply• 7 years ago

I would, it's just like Steve Jobs being a* hole while taking credit for everyone's work. In those cases it's a result of hierarchy in this case it's a case of the media looking for a media darling for their story. In either case it's not painting reality correctly. That being said it's not her fault and she should be proud of her accomplishment. It's the media which likes to paint pictures of reality like this, to single out a single person to take credit for what a team of researchers did or what a corporation did.

xondono• 7 years ago

Thought experiment: if you saw an article titled "Jony Ive: The Man Behind The iPhone" would you be commenting on how unfair it is to single him out?

Yes, and that’s what happens in each of those hyperbolic articles (that are mostly about Jobs, but same thing)

r_smart• 7 years ago

People do that all the time when everything Apple gets attributed to Steve Jobs.

hoorayimhelping• 7 years ago

Yes, absolutely. I've made comments before to the effect of: I cringe hard enough to actually feel physical discomfort every time a headline refers to a team effort of SpaceX as "Elon Musk's Rocket."

monksy8• 7 years ago

Maybe I'm alone in this, but I disliked the guy after hearing how he was promoted.

Make a BBC Horizon story about how he came to his best work and about him. That's cool. But to frame it as just being him and not the others behind the work.. it's nothing but hero worship.

etrautmann• 7 years ago

Yes - this is a constant peeve of mine. Stories are so much more powerful if there's a single inspirational character, but that's rarely how these types of scientific projects or development efforts came to fruition - especially in Jony Ive's case.

hgannita2• 7 years ago

Jony Ive actually was truly essential to the work behind the iPhone, so it wouldn't be unfair to single him out.

MattGrommes• 7 years ago

I agree. She's said many times she wasn't the only one involved and it's really a team win. The issue is that the media likes to have one winner and she was it. It's another version of the media dumbing down science coverage.

wklauss2• 7 years ago

It's not dumbing down science. Is making science relatable to an audience that otherwise would not care much about an image of a black hole. Having a "hero" in a story serves a purpose (many purposes, in this case) and it happens in every single field you can imagine.

Is that sport player really a star os is he/she a star because he has an amazing team that creates the opportunities for him/her to stand out?

Is this law championed by a politician really his/her idea or does he/she have a team of advisors that helped shape it?

Nobody lives in a vacuum. There isn't a single person, dead or alive, that has accomplish anything of importance without the help of others (knowingly or unknowingly, wether directly or indirectly) but at some point you have to take that for granted, to a certain degree, and focus on the figure that drives the enterprise, or makes a new discovery thanks to previous ones, or leads a team, or publish a paper.

It's not media who loves to have a winner, in any case. It's all of us, and the media obliges because it knows that a story with a hero is better told and better heard. It just happens that for some reason, in this case, having a hero seems to be unacceptable for some and I can't quite put my finger on why...

steego• 7 years ago

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 of a woman with a ton of hard-drives that resembles the iconic picture of Margaret Hamilton with a stack of papers. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who knows little to nothing about this project. What questions do you think people have?

Headlines have to create irresistible questions that lure people in and this one is using the tried and true "Who's this genius?" formula.

Once they've grabbed this casual reader (see headline), they're not going to dive too deep into the project. This isn't serious science journalism, this is a human interest story in the science section.

Why did they pick her? Because she lead the team and was a key figure in conceiving and implementing the algorithm. Because she was already the face, spokesperson and active promoter for this project. Look at her TED talk from 2017.

I get it. Tons of people deserve credit. More importantly, the story of how this team collaborated should be told. But that's not what this profile piece is about.

But let's get serious. You're critiquing the accuracy of a very casual profile piece for average readers. Most of them really don't care what statements are slightly hyperbolic, they just want to understand the gist of the project and her role.

njepa6• 7 years ago

The ironic thing is that this seems to be a case when someone doing the science gets to represent the project and get credit rather than just institutions and senior researchers.

monksy8• 7 years ago

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" (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. (That's something you get from working in teams outside academia)

If you go to the moon, you don't just praise the one guy who did it. You bring the whole group of astronauts who went and did something. If they're smart they're going to admit that there were a ton of people who helped.

EDIT-Update on the comment about the team praise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19638629

victor1062• 7 years ago

From the article:

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

realradicalwash4• 7 years ago

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.

njepa6• 7 years ago

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.

rcruzeiro• 7 years ago

Just like the Portuguese scientist involved is getting more coverage than her here in Portugal. It's just natural I guess. People want to find someone relatable.

diedyesterday2• 7 years ago

One difference is that you're all Portuguese in Portugal. But they are not all women in the US or whatever and they will react if they sense "unfairness". There are no (substantial) non-Portuguese in Portugal to react!

moonbug• 7 years ago

Yes won't someone spare a thought for the men

kemitchell• 7 years ago

I don't understand how "the woman behind the first black hole image" is hyperbole. She's a woman and she's behind the first black hole image.

I don't think anybody truly believes that taking images of black holes is a one-person job. And the title doesn't imply that. Neither does the next, boldface paragraph in the article:

A 29-year-old computer scientist has earned plaudits worldwide for helping develop the algorithm that created the first-ever image of a black hole.

Immediately followed by:

Katie Bouman led development of a computer program that made the breakthrough image possible.

aassddffasdf2• 7 years ago

The problem is with the article "the". She's one of many people behind the first black hole image.

BigFish12• 7 years ago

It doesn't say "A woman behind", it says "THE woman behind". Big difference.

throc3• 7 years ago

You're wrong, she did most of the work on the algorithm to make this work: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01413

Gpetrium5• 7 years ago

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 nefarious, ask yourself whether the society around you has outgrown the biases towards X biological characteristics

- When interacting with others, do not base your actions and thoughts on their biological characteristics.

- Celebrate, debate and criticize the work that the individual/team did, the work the author of the article did and the comments.

nardi3• 7 years ago

Seems to me that you are the one emphasizing “biological characteristics”. The article does not. Are you projecting, maybe?

Gpetrium5• 7 years ago

The Ycombinator text doesn't say it, but the link does. I think a lot of the negative reaction in here comes from the way people have started to perceive the narrative created by the media and personal feelings of threat (which is often unfounded).

I am all in for getting more people from all backgrounds into Computer & Sciences. I also agree that sometimes it is beneficial to have 'biological characteristics' added to articles to get certain groups to find someone to look up to. Humans are biologically set-up to do that, what the guideline implies is for everyone to do 'at least that' before creating biased comments.

Care to explain how the 'guidelines' comment is projecting?

cdelsolar• 7 years ago

Thanks, dad.

roguecoder16• 7 years ago

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

zorbagreek• 7 years ago

She actually wrote 2k lines of code. Alex Chael wrote 850.000 out of the 900k total, but is ignored.

Katie's lines of code did two things: 1) integrated the code of others 2) allowed you to change the font-size

patrickg_zill2• 7 years ago

The Chinese military used a similar method to find US spy planes - they used background signals from e.g. cell phone towers and looked for the area where there was a "blank spot" - which was the spy plane's absorption of the spectrum.

lambdadmitry• 7 years ago

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 myth.

patrickg_zill2• 7 years ago

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 claims can track F22 fighter even in stealth configuration: https://news.yahoo.com/stealth-no-more-china-claims-02470090...

And this is what is publicly released for public consumption...

streb-lo2• 7 years ago

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?

tropo3• 7 years ago

Do you think a man in a similar position would be elevated on a pedestal, to the exclusion of the algorithm designer (Mareki Honma) and the primary software author (Andrew Chael)?

streb-lo2• 7 years ago

Yes I think the world would be interested to meet the person behind viewing the first black hole regardless of their gender.

to the exclusion of the algorithm designer and the primary software author?

How can you possibly infer that from a git history?

inflatableDodo4• 7 years ago

Who gets elevated on a pedestal and who actually did the work appear to be so badly correlated across the entire breadth of human cultures that you would assume that they only share the most tenuous of causal linkages.

So yes, that happens a lot.

adventured• 7 years ago

I think people get consistently annoyed when blanket credit is given to eg Elon Musk regarding SpaceX (as though he's an aerospace god that did it all by himself), and when far too much credit was given to Steve Jobs regarding the iPhone. SpaceX is a case where Gwynne Shotwell deserves a chunk of the credit that is typically thrown at Musk by the media (because his stardom sells).

It's not that they don't deserve their fair share of credit, to be clear. It's that they do not deserve the level of overwhelming credit the media intentionally tries to bestow upon them, to create an idol that sells / generates clicks.

You pretty well see it in every thread regarding those two people. The hype train tries to give them credit, whether the media or fans, and other people get annoyed by it and call it out because it's obviously ridiculous to so overly credit such vast accomplishments requiring thousands of contributors to a given individual.

ikeyany2• 7 years ago

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.

roguecoder16• 7 years ago

We celebrated Mohawk NASA dude just as much as she’s being celebrated. Maybe we just like unabashedly enthusiastic engineers.

mgfist4• 7 years ago

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.

kaitai2• 7 years ago

Also, this is a few articles and a Facebook meme. There's no Nobel prize or anything. Why begrudge someone their 15 minutes of science fame for leading a cool effort, making cool science happen?

hnaccy• 7 years ago

I mean if she was a man I doubt two members of congress would've have bothered to comment or that there'd be article after article focusing on them specifically.

doctorpangloss• 7 years ago

On the one hand, no, not in a public setting.

On the other hand, looking at git histories is basically how the social parts of engineering (e.g., money and power) at a place like Google works, at its fundamental level.

This has persisted for a very, very long time. I still remember when people would comment things like, "I worked with so-and-so unorthodox former Google employee, and he didn't commit code."

There are a lot of Googlers on HN. There are a lot of people who work at places that culturally align themselves with how that company runs.

It probably has something to do with why some women feel underpaid or unwelcome at these places.

It definitely has something to do with people commenting things like, "So is this the case of the product manager taking credit..." The tension between the product manager who "didn't do anything" and the engineer who "did all the work" and how the "org" sees that and measures "performance" are all swimming in the back of HN people's heads when they snipe some random academic.

Settling the score in a way so reductive is extremely appealing. But at least in duels, the other person gets to fire back.

organsnyder• 7 years ago

But why would she be assumed to be the product manager (or its equivalent in the academic realm)? She has a doctorate in Computer Science from MIT, so she clearly has the technical chops. And she's in the early stages of her academic career, so she hasn't reached the point where she would have the ability to claim grad students' work as her own (which would also be a huge ethical lapse, though apparently it does happen [often with women as the victims]).

In my experience, people don't start looking into these things without some other suspicion. In a work setting, that would be things like impressions of poor productivity, claimed output not matching perceptions of competency, etc. But those involve a ton of data points, based on direct interactions with the person. In this case, the article gives us the following demographic data points:

- 29 years old

- Woman

- Computer Science doctorate from MIT

- Assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences at the California Institute of Technology

Which of those data points suggests that her work output should be questioned?

monksy8• 7 years ago

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)

newswriter993• 7 years ago

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

CydeWeys12• 7 years ago

Bullshit, this discovery was front page news worldwide. It's ridiculous on its face to assert that recognition isn't given to male scientists, given how many famous male scientists there are.

mgfist4• 7 years ago

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

anonytrary2• 7 years ago

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. It's amazing how willing people are to eat up a low-hanging narrative as long as it confirms their world-view. All it takes is a very crude understanding of how software development works to see through this narrative.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/bbykvf/ka...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bbuvff/this_is_andrew...

claudiawerner• 7 years ago

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...

Not_a_pizza2• 7 years ago

At the same time, it's totally common for professors to ride on the efforts of research students under their direction, to the point of being ethically questionable.

You might as well credit the Linux operating system to only a single man, whose effort is certainly largely responsible, but for who also does not in any way represent the whole of effort.

It's the ship of Theseus all over again.

black-tea3• 7 years ago

I understand how scientific research works. I'm on author on more than ten papers. I don't think it's silly to credit people properly.

MRD85• 7 years ago

I think it goes both ways. If she was a man she would have never had any fame from this. However, a man wouldn't have his git checked.

Not_a_pizza2• 7 years ago

If Katie was a man, there would still be a large question as whether to praise one person, except as the leader of the effort.

rjf72• 7 years ago

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".

black-tea3• 7 years ago

Yes, I think they would. Why do you have to bring gender into this?

seaborn633• 7 years ago

I am not a female, but I am a bootcamp grad with no college degree working as a sw engineer. At almost every place I've worked at so far I've had co-workers go through my GitHub and then make comments about how I shouldn't be working there.

I have no idea why people are doing this to Dr. Bouman, if it's gender related or not. Just stating my experiences.

Just so I'm fair, my GitHub does suck.

gyrgtyn• 7 years ago

that sucks and is very weird

OldSchoolJohnny• 7 years ago

No.

diedyesterday2• 7 years ago

Of course they would. At least some feminists would. Even now some Nobel prizes (e.g. Watson for DNA structure) and the credit for some discoveries attributed to some men is disputed by some feminist activists. I hate all this identity politics though.

Also if she was a man her story and contribution wouldn't be as sensationalized as has been done.

geden• 7 years ago

BBC covered it more as a team effort for this BBC4 doc I watched last night.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00042l4/how-to-see-a-...

PascLeRasc• 7 years ago

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...

moyix• 7 years ago

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

gsteinb88• 7 years ago

Looks like matplotlib to me (assuming you mean the top window, not the terminal or what looks like a browser behind)

bartimus3• 7 years ago

Now let's try to generate some pics of the lunar landing sites.

bartimus3• 7 years ago

Can somebody explain why this got downvoted? I'm genuinly interested if this is possible with the technology (using optical telescopes). This was my (poor) attempt to start an open conversation about it.

old_rot• 7 years ago

Mega Science projects are always huge collaborative efforts. This remarkable scientific achievement is now unfairly focused on an individual. Lets compare this with a couple of other mega science discoveries. The gravitational waves detection discovery was not attributed to any single individual. The collaboration got the credit for it. Back in 2012 when ATLAS experiment at CERN announced the discovery of Higgs boson, the collaboration spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti made the announcement through quite an impressive presentation of the results. Yet the discovery was attributed to the whole collaboration. In both these occasions no Eureka moment photographs were publicized and stole the credit.

In particle physics, these practices evolved over decades, when specific individuals tried to claim credits for discoveries in an unfair way(Nobel dream by Gary Taubes gives a beautiful account of this). Many particle physics collaborations now have detailed constitution and guidelines on what images/graphs they can show to the public. Someone who first made the first Higgs mass plot which shows a 5 sigma evidence of Higgs observation could not have leaked that plot on social media.

However this narrative is inspiring and perhaps motivate many young woman to take up careers in science and promote a more welcoming atmosphere for women in STEM.

roguecoder16• 7 years ago

Hacker’s News is so sexist they can’t just find the joy in this algorithm genius’ success. She solved one of those hard technical problems we always talk about, and the world is richer for it.

philonoist• 7 years ago

What many people here committing is logical fallacy of Tu Quoque[0]. Just because people wrongly attributed disproportionate credence of such creativity, fame, and inspiration to Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and all, it doesn't mean they must be mute to such continued disproportionate bias of limelight and recognition when add another one adds to the list. We are always allowed to correct ourselves whenever we find such bias regardless of it emanating from some implied message of jealousy or butt hurt attitude because a minority section has achieved. This is why I like HN( and back in the day, Quora). They are so beautifully intelligent minded that they won't even leave git histories and published papers. This, I have seen on many submissions here.

Never have men at large objected to such bias when women have cited theories and concepts discovered by men to publish papers and win medals in the field of mathematics. That is something naysayers should ponder over.

All the documentaries, autobiographies, and famous books that peered deep into the lives of those inspirational people always give proportionate credit to those contributors of success either by these people or the authentic researchers. Katie was no less enthusiastic when it was her turn.

But these news agencies play with people's emotions, desires,aspirations, etc. These news agencies are capitalistic and optimize over consumerism. These news agencies are shameless whores to betray the principles of intellectual honesty and journalistic ethics in dissemination of facts by kowtowing to the appeasement of the disgruntled - who happen to be majority of their viewers.

But? We, the layman, are hapless to (1) gain knowledge from immediate sources (2) draw immediate conclusions from these sources. We can't be blamed for not putting efforts to gain complete picture or check the veracity of middlemen called the media. We run forward the self fulling prophecy originating from media. The trust was put in reputed media and that is why the media should care for its reputation. That trust was put in the media because it was touted as fourth pillar of democracy who can't commit hypocrisy in its main endeavors to expose the truth.

Whereas otherwise, the organization Katie Bouman is working, official representatives such as MIT blogs, and TED talks have all credited to the development of original algorithm, though when it was at nascent stage, to THE Katie Bouman, while at the same time to her team for handling in subsequent parts.

I salute her. With relevant degree and using her education in imaging black holes, she set the discourse of the main branch that others picked up. If the idea and algorithm germinated in her mind, she should get credit for it, simple. All she needed is few people to delegate implementation of her ideas or modify it for sustenance. If somebody furthered her ideas enough that it can be versioned as 2.0 or 3.0, then they get equal credit and status as her in final mission[1]. She can patent her invention rightly for conjuring the initial stages of algorithm using all of her own cognitive capabilities.

But we should go only so far. Even women aspirants will get disheartened and show recidivism by wrongly strengthening the bias that they are somehow less capable in attaining pinnacles of STEM, when they learn that the achievements of women in reality is not what media portrays. This is why I consider the twitter photo of her being placed aside Margaret Hamilton as the efforts are no way comparable ceteris paribus.

Moreover, if lack of minority role models is enough of a reason to discourage that aspiring minority from their passions, then it would be no less effective in discouragement of non-minority's passions when there is lack of attention and acknowledgement to non-majority's achievements. I mean how did Katie meander through her success to begin with, if there were no role models to her in the field she is working, in the first place?

People say that men had plenty of men in annals of history to look up to, but I'd contend that women aren't in anyway stopped to take inspiration and pique their curiosity in men's achievements just like men take inspiration from Marie Curie or Hedy Lamarr apart from the sea of men.

[0]rationalwiki.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

[1] I mean Prof Falcke.

seaborn633• 7 years ago

It's so awesome! I thought it was kinda cool that it actually looks a little bit like the one from Interstellar.

<sarcasm> I just wish they had used a camera from this century </sarcasm>

daosulta• 7 years ago

Redirect your confusion towards that unprofessional media outlet. What Dr. Bouman has to do with this? Read or listen to her interviews, she always highlights that it was a team effort.

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

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