Kristen Stewart co-authors AI paper | Hacker News Reader

Kristen Stewart co-authors AI paper

theverge.com

129 pointstomssilver65 comments

She has a defined Erdős–Bacon number now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_numbe...

That Wikipedia vortex took me to Ruth-Aaron pairs: sequential numbers whose prime factors each sum to the same value.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth%E2%80%93Aaron_pair

Looks like it's 9.

Bhautik Joshi, first author on this paper, collaborated with Sébastien Ourselin on e.g. [1], and Sébastien Ourselin has an Erdős number of 5 [2]. So Stewart's Erdős number is at most 7.

Her Bacon number is 2. 'We learned that Kristen Stewart has a Bacon number of two because she and Michael Sheen costarred together in "The Twilight Saga," and Sheen and Bacon starred in "Frost/Nixon."' [3]

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220677921_A_quantit...

[2] https://zbmath.org/collaboration-distance/?a=ourselin.sebast...

[3] http://www.mtv.com/news/2442193/bacon-number-google/

Does the paper have to be peer-reviewed? The only arxiv reference on that wikipedia page is the same paper this thread is about.

Reminds me of John Urschel: PhD candidate in mathematics (MIT) and offensive lineman for Ravens. Wrote six papers while playing in NFL. https://math.mit.edu/~urschel/

John Urschel is a legit full-time mathematician. Stewart's coauthorship seems to have more to do with her skills as a director than computer scientist.

"Bhautik Joshi posted a paper to arXiv on the topic of some consulting work he did for a short film, and listed the producer and actor as co-authors to garner publicity."

No, they actually did write parts of the paper.

Leaving them out as co-authors would be misconduct.

Source?

Is any arXiv preprint more untrustworthy than any other or something [I mean, it's not viXra...]?

I can't help but think it would be degrading to have your name on a paper and it be deemed too advanced to be your responsibility..

You could ask the first author directly, I suppose; https://twitter.com/bhautikj

My question was directed at "salem" who stated "No, they actually did write parts of the paper.". That statement seemed like it should have reasoning behind it...

The paper is about how to iteratively tweak your rendering pipeline to achieve a certain look. It makes sense that the director of the movie would be involved in that process.

If I tell someone to blur a background during postprocessing, do I also get a coauthor credit on a paper about gaussian photo manipulation?

If the particular blur in question has a unique characteristic, you should push for it, sure.

So, you didn't read the paper, huh?

I did. They describe using a Keras implementation, written by someone else, of style transfer, which was invented by someone else, to achieve a particular artistic effect. They use a pre-trained model. They don't even have to buy any hardware, since they used AWS GPU instances. It's a case study, nothing new has been accomplished here.

Do I also get a Verge writeup if I publish a PDF to arxiv about how I compiled and installed tensorflow? The only reason we're talking about this paper is because the name of a Hollywood actress is on it, and because it has the AI buzzword.

Look at the title: "Kristen Stewart co-authors AI paper". 113 points.

The paper itself was submitted earlier, under its actual title, which does not mention Kristen Stewart: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443107 6 points! The paper is not very interesting. The only thing that makes it newsworthy is the coauthor.

My source?

I would ask what is the source of that quote? The article no longer contains it.

Actually, she's not an actor in the (short) film in question, she is the director as stated in TFA. The ML technique is applied to achieve a specific effect the director wanted to achieve.

Did she submit PRs to TensorFlow? Probably not. Did she contribute to the paper? Most definitely, I think we can even go so far as to say it's plausible she fulfills the Vancouver criteria:

Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or (..)

AND

Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content;

AND

Final approval of the version to be published;

AND

Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work

Assuming she at some point revised the paper critically for content, which is plausible, there is no denying she's on the author list.

It is plausible that she had some input to the paper beyond requesting the work, and artistic feedback. But it's definitely more likely that she didn't.

>But it's definitely more likely that she didn't.

Why is it "definitely more likely"?

Duh. She's a girl and everyone knows girls can't program. </sarcasm>

Perhaps more charitably, because she has no known history of having done so, and her talents in the acting profession are not generally considered directly transferable.

The vast majority of programmers are men, and acting and AI research are pretty polar opposite activities. Most actors/actresses aren't tech geeks.

I guess I'll get downvoted for this too because it sounds anti-women or something, but it is the unfortunate truth.

Would it be safe to say your opinion of Steve Jobs is similar?

It is plausible that Steve Jobs had some input to the iPod beyond requesting the work, and artistic feedback. But it's definitely more likely that he didn't.

Steve Jobs didn't co-author any papers on capacitive touchscreen technology or whatever.

But Steve Jobs got the patent: https://www.google.com/patents/US7479949

The point was that there is no requirement beyond conceiving of the work and intellectual (not just spelling and grammar) feedback for her to be considered a coauthor.

It's not very different from a professor having a idea, giving it to a grad student to implement, run and write the paper, and then the professor gives feedback on the paper before submitting.

Your professor can fully understand your work, could have done it herself if she had the time, and can fully check your work for any flaws or limitations. Your non-technical manager cannot fully understand your work, do it herself or check it.

If "Substantial contributions to the conception ... of the work" is enough to be a co-author, she should be a co-author. But that means that if Pointy-Haired-Boss tells Dilbert to "make the Skype call to Mars less laggy" and Dilbert invents FTL communication, PHB gets to be co-author of the paper (and resulting Nobel prize?). That seems too generous to PHB.

That was my initial reaction, but if you look at section 2, both paragraphs could plausibly have been written by Stewart and/or Shapiro; all the images are authored by Stewart as the director.

Trying to apply a technology is enough to publish ?

Definitely. And I wouldn't be surprised to see more methods papers from movies going forward.

What constitutes a publishable paper depends on the subfield and journal/conference.

There are many computer science papers discussing the usability, implementation, application of tech ologies.

There are basically no barriers to "publication" on arXiv.

If you can write something useful about the results or the things you discovered or developed in the process, sure. (Not in every venue of course, but in many)

I don't know enough about the specific subfields involved here to guess where and if this specific example would likely pass.

Someone posted a link to the paper on HN a few hours ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443107

Here's the direct link: https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.04928

We have a new Erdos-Bacon number! (I assume)

Is this the anti-Kardashian index? https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...

Does she have a background in the field?

I look at the comments here and it becomes blatantly obvious why we have trouble getting women into STEM.

I doubt it would have been that different if the person in question was Robert Pattinson. I think the condescension is more about a "lol as if some dumb actor knows anything about AI".

https://www.google.com/patents/US2292387

How does it become obvious? (Not snark, actual question)

Women who do not follow the domestic norm are looked down upon in society. Beauvoir is explaining that woman referred as “the other.” She states, “What is a woman?’ […] The fact that I ask it is in itself significant. A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: ‘I am a woman’; on this truth must be based all further discussion. A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man. […] It would be out of the question to reply: ‘And you think the contrary because you are a man,’ for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity.” (34-5) As for man there is no need to define what is to be a man, there is no reason because they identified themselves as the superior part. Man represents both “the positive and the neutral,” which doesn’t need to be explained or defined, and it is self-explanatory. “Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in relation to herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being.” (35) Men are the default setting and women are considered a recessive gender. “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.” (35) It is like an asymmetrical comparison, but masculine and feminine aren’t asymmetrical. De Beauvoir defines women as the “Second sex” because women are defined in relation to men. Aristotle referred that women are “female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities.” De Beauvoir also points out that St. Thomas referred to the woman as the “imperfect man", the "incidental” being.

unification of the symbols from current context with this paragraph are left as an exercise to the reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_de_Beauvoir#Existential...

Has anybody said anything about her gender?

I thought it was pretty clear that the surprise and skepticism is around her background as an actress.

If the article mentioned that she had been studying Math/CS/etc. in her private time to get the background needed to contribute to the paper, I'm pretty sure the comments would be pretty different, though her gender wouldn't have changed.

I guess that's how you call peak hype.

Hype is not model-invariant

I doubt she wrote a single word in that paper.

Why? It's not unheard of that an actress contributes to technology[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr

More examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdős–Bacon_number#Actors

A nonspecialist such as Stewart may or may not have contributed to the paper.

All the evidence we have now is her name on the paper (for which there is obviously a strong propaganda/PR incentive for all authors, so that evidence should be at least partially discounted).

I certainly wouldn't consider this (fairly thin) body of evidence dispositive in an unusual situation such as this.

I'd be more convinced by e.g. a string of commits on the paper's repo coming from her account (if we were confident that her account was really hers).

The parent's skepticism seems to me entirely warranted, given the currently available evidence, and I don't think it should be downvoted.

I was going to comment this exact article earlier but I thought I would just seem like some vocal minority. I'm glad you linked this.

Look at some of her smaller, more independent role choices. Some smart and interesting choices, very well executed. I don't believe this can be simply ascribed to "handling."

She catches considerable grief for some big, very-well-paid, and "sparkly" roles (thanks, Craig Ferguson). Sometimes, she almost seems to share that attitude herself about them.

But she's also entrenched herself as a very moneyed, A-List actor. I wonder what she may use that for and where she may take it.

It's always worth remembering that theatre kids are nerds; they're nerds on a level that makes "good at math" look like division winning quarterback.

Given that most hollywood actors and actresses come from theater in one form or another (especially, at minimum, "theater kid" groups in HS), the latter part of that is debatable.

I mean maybe Disney's High School Musical series gave them a bit of a boost in the aughts but I'm pretty sure Rent-heads will always be at the bottom of the social totem pole.

I don't know where you're from, but where I'm from, the math/computer nerds were a billion times more outcasted than the theater nerds ever were in HS. I've lived all over the country since and found that to consistently be the case.

I read this article to find out who she was. I had assumed she was a noteworthy scientist I hadn't heard of.

Why do people on HN love to mention how they haven't heard of someone conventionally famous?

Thank you for the condescension. It was a request for clarification in the title.

I am sure there are plenty of people whom I consider "conventionally famous" whom you've never heard of. That doesn't make you an idiot.

There was no request of any sort in your comment.

A request usually implies a question. You didn't ask one. You simply stated you didn't know her. Your post was actually far more condescending as written.

I've heard of Kristen Stewart, but only the actress, not the scientist. I assumed the same. "Ah well, suppose that must be a common name."

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