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ilarum

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

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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.

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?

It depends a bit on the scientific field, but in mine (computer vision, which this was also published in) the first author is the "main" author, usually doing most if not all the "ground work", then you have collaborators and co-authors, and finally the supervisors (in the case of the PhD student that she was at the time). It is becoming more common to see papers with "Author1, Author2, Author3..." lists, where the "*" authors count with equal contribution. This is important for attribution and the infamous metrics that funding often depends on, but it's not the case here.

So I'm certain those authors did their part, so maybe yes, I should have linked this as "Bouman et al." but I wouldn't expect this to be six equal contributions either.

That all being said, she's certainly standing on the shoulders of a pyramid of giants there.

Edit: to the people downvoting the parent, maybe explain? I didn't take this as a bad faith comment. It can be genuinely confusing to someone who doesn't know the ins and outs of academic attribution...

I'd argue that in practice science is more of a pile of giants.

Giant turtles. Its giant turtles all the way down.

I've found that CS contributions in academia are often poorly credited (sometimes even entirely neglected) to endeavors not purely executed within CS itself.

It's interesting considering how many modern scientific endeavors are dependent on new innovative algorithms, software, and computing techniques in both experimental and theoretical work then its frequently just hand-waved away as "technology."

I'm not saying such contributions (typically, though they can,) lay groundwork for an experiment or theory in another domain, but I am saying active CS involvement/expertise is typically critical to many scientific endeavors' success these days. If a project is interdiscipinary, there's probably a computer scientist on the team helping out.

Although I agree with the point you have raised, it can sometimes be a little tricky to draw the line. Should we have Microsoft cited for projects completed using their software or system? Should we always cite Newton when using calculus?

I think society implicitly assumes that there has been a tone of people backing up a single individual towards their main achievements and that the individual is humble enough to know and to try - ever so slightly - to show appreciation.

That's why I said "actively."

From my perspective, if in order to accomplish your work, you need consult or active collaboration with a computer scientist and otherwise could not develop/test your theory or conduct your experiment, then they almost certainly should be cited as an author/collaborator.

If you utilize something OTS outside the project that just works for you and don't need a computer scientist, then whatever entity created that OTS IP isn't really an author/collaborator, but it's likely their work should be cited/referenced if it's part of the critical methodology (as part of disclosure and repeatability).

If your project used Microsoft Word to write up a report, it's not important to the underlying science you conducted. You could have substituted it with TeX, other Word processors, or pen/paper and it wouldn't change the outcome of the underlying theory/experiment you developed. If you used an Ansys package to perform analysis for some purpose, you should probably mention that out of rigor but Ansys isn't an author or collaborator.

If on the other hand you need someone to architect a solution to handle processing your massive dataset, needed someone to write custom code because nothing could do what you needed, needed a new algorithm because you had no clue how to approach the problem, or even needed someone to modify source code significantly to something that existed but couldn't do what you needed, then they are certainly an author/collaborator. If you took existing code/algorithm and made it more efficient in order to accomplish a task that would have taken too long otherwise, you're a contributor/collaborator and should be listed as an author.

This has been a huge issue in academic research but it's been getting a bit better and researchers are starting even more to acknowledge/credit computing professionals as crucial contributors and authors, as they rightfully should be.

> That's why I said "actively."

That's one of the reasons I said "I agree with the point you have raised".

I also think you have once again, raised some good points. Hopefully, others will use similar structures when writing and publishing their research.

Not just CS, but depending on the discipline, math and statistics more generally.

I’ve gotten authorship when I have collaborated on the paper itself (rather than just research: that’s how you get into acknowledgements, same as lab techs, collaborators who didn’t work on this specific paper, etc.)

In this case she is a Computer Scientist, so the CS contributions are the first author on the paper.

Papers are routinely credited to their first author. Everyone understand the co-authors also took part. She also clearly credits the rest of the team in the posted BBC article.

She does clearly credit the rest of the team, which is admirable as she's also clearly been key to this piece of work.

Somehow though my facebook feed is already littered with images saying she was single-handedly responsible and no one's talking about her.

https://bit.ly/2Gkfk7f

Very few science papers have a single author these days. She's listed as first author, so presumably her contribution was at least as important as anyone else's.

If we want to be pedantic, this paper is the work of millions of humans throughout history, who have helped developed the math knowledge for such a project to even be feasible.

> 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.

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

ok, so just so everyone is clear, the point between parent and grandparent is Andrew Chael seems to have written a hell of a lot more code than Katie Bouman, for a lot longer

* achael 566 commits 850,275 ++ 131,044 --

* klbouman 90 commits 2,410 ++ 1,265 --

However, at least at the level of reading the commit messages, Katie's are pretty math heavy:

"fixed bug in the fake briggs weighting"

"starting to fix chirp problems with polrep"

"made it possible to do a min uv cut on closure phase when adding it a..."

While Andrew's lean frequently toward code maintenance:

"updated some docstrings in imager_utils"

"moved imgsum to plotting.summary_plots"

"modified README"

That said, Andrew and others seem to have pretty good insight too.

https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/commit/886b07b8a00d142...

one commit with 524,306 additions. adding a model.

she could have written 0 lines and be "the woman behind the picture".

Writing code is easy, figuring out complex algorithms is something very different, and does not require coding knowledge

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

Exactly. One project I worked on a while back involved me taking a big pile of very clever and complicated Matlab code and rewriting it in python in a way that made it easy to use from other projects and able to read a couple of additional input file formats. If you just look at the commits on that project it would look like I was responsible for 90+% of the entire thing, while in truth I was basically just doing transcribing and cleaning and had basically nothing to do with any of the difficult parts.

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

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

Linus wrote the most code to start the project though, that doesn't seem a good example.

To add some more context... of the 850k lines, 500k lines are mostly models and machine generated code. Andrew is definitely smart (smarter than an average HN user) and his code is very important but I have never seen so much display of misogyny and sexism against a woman scientist. She never took any credit and clearly said that this was a team effort. Some of the top posts on reddit are trying to mischaracterize the work that Dr.Katie has done and the comments are so vile.

> so much display of misogyny and sexism against a woman scientist

There are no woman scientists, science has no gender.

The article is sexiest not people who are curious what Dr. Bouman actually did to be honored to mention in BBC article.

We don’t exist in a purely meritocratic and egalitarian society. Maybe you have never been told that you are not good enough for some work but growing up in deeply paternalistic society, I constantly heard “women are too stupid for hard sciences and they should just stick to kitchens”. If celebrating her achievements in this way changes minds of a few people and inspires a few girls to believe in themselves, I think it is worth the “biased” coverage that she is getting for her work.

> I grew up hearing women are too stupid for hard sciences

Bad for you.

Thanks God I grew up in a society where every person no matter of gender and age can do hard science.

Nobody is saying that only some societies have both genders doing hard sciences. It’s the matter of opportunity.

People don’t surrender their outside identity when they become a scientist.

People don't surrender their outside political views, their lineage, sexual orientation and other background either. See how stupid the article would sound if titled: "Jane Doe: The divorced homosexual black democratic woman with three children behind the first black hole image". Science matters.

It's fallacious to presume that — because gender, sex, race, etc. shouldn't impact peoples' opportunities — that we should treat is as though it doesn't impact them.

This is a good article on the concept: https://everydayfeminism.com/2013/09/dont-see-race/

[Edit:] Or this, as a complementary one: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-dont-see-race

One of the few redeeming features of the HN conventions of civility and seriousness is that we don't have Reddit's problems and we don't need to talk about Reddit.

But what could possibly qualify you to say that "Andrew is definitely smart (smarter than an average HN user) and his code is very important"?

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.

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?

Honestly I'd take satisfaction in what I had built. As a leader I'd greatly enjoy giving credit to the team who committed to my vision and made it a reality.

It's offensive and frustrating. I don't understand why people have to try and pull holes in this kind of celebration like there is some conspiracy to promote Katie at the cost of others.

If I read it right, she mentioned and praised her team as well.

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