Katie Bouman, a researcher who helped create the first image of a black hole, quickly gained internet fame Thursday for her role in the project after a photo of her went viral. But internet trolls soon followed, questioning Bouman’s work and floating false claims that she did not have much of a role in the project. Colleagues rallied to her defense, but the situation highlighted the vitriol that women continue to face on the internet, and the continued vulnerability of major internet platforms to trolling campaigns. Bouman, a postdoctoral fellow who will soon be an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, noted in a Facebook post Wednesday that “no one algorithm or person made this image” and published a photo of the many people she worked alongside. The photo of the black hole was the end result of the work of hundreds of researchers and eight telescopes. Bouman’s public recognition — much of it applauding an example of a woman at the forefront of a major scientific effort — drew attention from misogynist communities on the internet. Some users congregated on Reddit and created videos questioning Bouman’s contribution that were then uploaded to Instagram and YouTube. By Friday, falsehoods claiming it was not Bouman but a male colleague who deserved credit for the black hole image overtook legitimate coverage in search results on YouTube and Instagram. On YouTube, the first video result for users who search for “Katie Bouman” returns a video titled “Woman Does 6% of the Work but Gets 100% of the Credit: Black Hole Photo.” The video is riddled with inaccuracies, and largely draws from a falsehood created on Reddit and pushed heavily by a “men’s rights” community. Hours later, a similar search showed that the video was no longer appearing at the top of YouTube's results. YouTube algorithm vs. Katie Bouman pic.twitter.com/3TABQ2vitN — Max Woolf (@minimaxir) April 12, 2019 The video claims Andrew Chael, a “straight white male” did most of the work, based on the number of publicly available lines of code for the project on the website Github. Chael, an astrophysicist and graduate student at Harvard University who worked with Bouman, responded on Twitter saying the conspiracy theory is “awful and sexist,” and added that he’s gay. The theory claims that Chael wrote 850,000 lines of code, which he says is also wrong, adding there are 68,000 lines of code total in the current software. A YouTube spokesperson told NBC News that the company is working to change its system to value authoritative content. “We've taken a number of steps to address this including surfacing more authoritative content across our site for people searching for news-related topics, beginning to reduce recommendations of borderline content and showing information panels with more sources where they can fact check information for themselves,” the spokesperson said in an email. “We’ve seen meaningful progress as a result and are committed to making more improvements going forward.” (1/7) So apparently some (I hope very few) people online are using the fact that I am the primary developer of the eht-imaging software library (https://t.co/n7djw1r9hY) to launch awful and sexist attacks on my colleague and friend Katie Bouman. Stop. — Andrew Chael (@thisgreyspirit) April 12, 2019 Becca Lewis, a research affiliate at nonprofit research institute Data & Society who studies extremism on YouTube, said this was another example of YouTube’s algorithm “rewarding engagement and time spent on the site to maximize advertising revenue” instead of facts. “Time and again, we see that this leads YouTube to recommend sensationalist content that is often conspiratorial or bigoted,” Lewis said. “In turn, content creators are incentivized to create this kind of content, and a culture has emerged on the platform that is deeply reactionary.” Instagram had also been co-opted by the anti-Bouman campaign. An account impersonating Bouman, with the username “katieboumanoffficial,” was the first result for users looking up “Katie Bouman” in Instagram’s search box. The account, which impersonated an Instagram model until November, began impersonating Bouman late Thursday night, posting several headshots and screenshots of YouTube videos featuring Bouman. Descriptions on the images of the account, however, spread false claims about Bouman. One description changes Chael’s name to “Andrew Chad,” a reference to “Chads,” internet misogynist terminology for men who are attractive to women. “He is Andrew Chad. He wrote 850,000 of the 900,000 lines of code that were written in the historic black-hole image algorithm!” the description reads. Instagram did not respond to a request for comment.<doc-sep>Katie Bouman, the 29-year-old researcher who became an overnight celebrity after a viral photo of her circulated the internet following her work that helped lead to the first image of a black hole Wednesday. However, Internet trolls attempted to discredit her work on the project, saying she did not play a big part. Bouman, a postdoctoral fellow who will soon be an assistant professor at Cal Tech, celebrated the work of a team that helped make the image of the black hole possible. “No one algorithm or person made this image, it required the amazing talent of a team of scientists from around the globe and years of hard work to develop the instrument, data processing, imaging methods, and analysis techniques that were necessary to pull off this seemingly impossible feat,” she wrote. KATIE BOUMAN IS THE 29-YEAR-OLD SCIENTIST BEHIND FIRST IMAGE OF BLACK HOLE A picture of Bouman reacting to her sudden celebrity status this week went viral. But following her newfound fame, Bouman became the target of Internet trolls who said Andrew Chael, a male colleague, did most of the work on the project. Memes of Chael that said he was responsible for “850,000 of the 900,000 of code that were written in the historic black-hole image algorithm” went viral on social media sites such as Reddit and Twitter, The Hill reported. The first video that came up after a search of Katie Bouman on YouTube was titled, “Woman does 6% of the Work but Gets 100% of the Credit: Black Hole Photo,” NBC News reported. A few hours later, it appeared at the top of YouTube’s search results. Chael responded to the memes in a thread on Twitter saying the project “was a team effort” and applauded Bouman for her work. “So apparently some (I hope very few) people online are using the fact that I am the primary developer of the eht-imaging [sic] software library to launch awful and sexist attacks on my colleague on my friend Katie Bouman, Stop.” 4 LESSONS HUMANITY LEARNED FROM THE NEW BLACK HOLE IMAGE “Our papers used three independent imaging software libraries (including one developed by my friend @sparse_k),” he wrote. “While I wrote much of the code for one of these pipelines, Katie was a huge contributor to the software; it would have never worked without her contributions and the work of many others who wrote code, debugged, and figured out how to use the code on challenging EHT data.” Chael, an astrophysicist and student at Harvard University, clarified that he did not “write ‘850,000 lines of code'” and that “there are about 68,000 lines in the current software.” “So while I appreciate the congratulations on a result that I worked hard on for years, if you are congratulating me because you have a sexist vendetta against Katie, please go away and reconsider your priorities in life,” he wrote. Chael wrote in a follow-up tweet that he is a gay astronomer and hoped to tweet “more about black holes and other subjects I am passionate about.” Fox News’ Brie Stimson contributed to this report.<doc-sep>29-year-old Katie Bouman 'didn't know anything about black holes'—then she helped capture the first photo of one On Wednesday, after 10 years of planning and scientific investments totaling over $50 million , researchers released the first-ever image of a black hole. The image is a feat of modern science — experts say it's the equivalent of taking a photo of an orange on the moon with a smartphone — and international collaboration. Over 200 scientists across the globe contributed to the project. One of those scientists is Katie Bouman, a 29-year-old computer scientist who began working on the project when she was a graduate student at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. Bouman earned her bachelor's in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Soon, she'll begin working as an assistant professor in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department at the California Institute of Technology. But when she became involved in the project almost six years ago, she had no experience studying black holes. "I go after problems that excite me. When I started this project, I didn't know anything about black holes and honestly, it was a risky project," Bouman tells CNBC Make It . "But my heart was in this project. I love this project, and I think that that's what makes it a success. When you get really smart people together, who are super motivated by the problem that they're working on, I think people will figure out the answers." Bouman has gained recognition on social media from a number of public figures including Senator Kamala Harris, who wrote on Twitter, "Katie Bouman proved women in STEM don't just make the impossible, possible, but make history while doing it." "So incredibly excited for Dr. Katie Bouman and her work to get the first picture of a black hole that was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope and rendered by HER algorithm," tweeted Reshma Saujani, founder and CEO of Girls Who Code. Story continues But Bouman was just one of many scientists working on the project. Of the more than 200 researchers working on the project, roughly 40 were women, according to The New York Times. "There were lots of people on these teams," says Bouman. "I don't want to call out any person as the leader." Nonetheless, Bouman's research led to the creation of a new algorithm that allowed scientists to bring the black hole image to life, a task with a level of difficulty that cannot be overstated. "The black hole is really, really far away from us. The one we showed a picture of is 55 million light years away. That means that image is what the black hole was like 55 million years ago," explains Bouman. "The law of diffraction tells us that given the wavelength that we need in order to see that event horizon, which is about one millimeter, and the resolution we need to see a ring of that size, we would need to build an earth-sized telescope." That is where computer scientists like Bouman came in. "Obviously, we can't build an earth-sized telescope. So instead, what we did is we built a computational earth-sized telescope," she says. "We took telescopes that were already built around the world and were able to observe at the wavelength we needed, and we connected them together into a network that would work together." That computational telescope is the Event Horizon Telescope , a constellation of telescopes in the South Pole, Chile, Spain, Mexico and the United States. After researchers coordinated the super-powerful telescopes, scientists like Bouman were tasked with interpreting a massive amount of data. "The team collected about five petabytes of data, and one petabyte is a thousand terabytes," explains Bouman. "Your typical computer has maybe one terabyte or so. So that would be like 5,000 typical laptops of data. It's just a huge. I mean, we basically had to freeze light onto these hard drives." The data was so large that researchers had to transport the data by plane from around the world. According to MIT, Bouman led one of four teams responsible for turning this mind-numbing amount of data into one verifiable image. If their team was going to claim to have produced the world's first-ever image of a black hole, they needed to be certain. "We spent years developing methods, many different types of methods — I don't think any one method should be highlighted — because most of all, we were afraid of shared human bias," says Bouman. "If I made an image with my method and and it looks like a ring, I don't want someone to look at my picture and then subconsciously make their image look like a ring too." For this reason, the computer scientists broke into four teams and did not communicate while they were analyzing the data. After months of the teams working independently, they all converged in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and ran their algorithms in the same room, at the same time. The resulting image is one we now recognize as a black hole: a bright ring that's slightly brighter on the bottom. The researchers spent the next several months trying to find flaws in their approach. When they were unable to "break" the image, they knew they had made a discovery. This scientific necessity to eliminate bias and approach problems from several points of view is one reason experts stress that the sciences need a wide-range of diverse young people to enter the field, and Bouman agrees. She says she wishes that young people, especially girls and women, understood that pursuing a career in a field like computer science can lead to opportunities beyond sitting in front of a screen. "If you study things like computer science and electrical engineering, it's not just building circuits in your lab," she says. "You can go out to a telescope at 15,000 feet above sea level, and you can use those skills to do something that no one's ever done before." Like this story? Subscribe to CNBC Make It on YouTube! Don't miss:<doc-sep>The 29-year-old computer scientist will go down in history. Algorithmic Assist It took a team of more than 200 scientists to create the first image of the event horizon of a black hole — and the internet is currently in love with one of them. Computer scientist Katie Bouman led the development of the algorithm that made the breathtaking black hole image possible, and soon after the Event Horizon Telescope team revealed the photo on Wednesday, another image — this one a shot of Bouman that she posted to her Facebook page — started making the rounds online. “Watching in disbelief as the first image I ever made of a black hole was in the process of being reconstructed,” the 29-year-old wrote of the photo, which was subsequently shared by everyone from CNN to Kamala Harris. Here's the moment when the first black hole image was processed, from the eyes of researcher Katie Bouman. #EHTBlackHole #BlackHoleDay #BlackHole (v/@dfbarajas) pic.twitter.com/n0ZnIoeG1d — MIT CSAIL (@MIT_CSAIL) April 10, 2019 Advertisement Advertisement Women Who Code The online photo frenzy wasn’t over, though. Many in the Twitterverse and beyond noted the similarities between an image of Bouman with piles of hard drives containing black hole image data and an image of another female computer scientist, Margaret Hamilton, standing next to the stacks of code she wrote to help NASA put astronauts on the Moon in 1969. Still, Bouman, who is now an assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences at the California Institute of Technology, is quick to note that creating the first black hole image wasn’t a one-woman job. “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.” Advertisement Advertisement Left: MIT computer scientist Katie Bouman w/stacks of hard drives of black hole image data. Right: MIT computer scientist Margaret Hamilton w/the code she wrote that helped put a man on the moon. (image credit @floragraham)#EHTblackhole #BlackHoleDay #BlackHole pic.twitter.com/Iv5PIc8IYd — MIT CSAIL (@MIT_CSAIL) April 10, 2019 READ MORE: That image of a black hole you saw everywhere? Thank this grad student for making it possible [CNN] More on the black hole image: Scientists Just Released the First-Ever Image of a Black Hole As a Futurism reader, we invite you join the Singularity Global Community, our parent company’s forum to discuss futuristic science & technology with like-minded people from all over the world. It’s free to join, sign up now! Advertisement Advertisement<doc-sep>
Katie Bouman: The woman behind the first black hole image Published 11 April 2019 media caption Katie Bouman designed an algorithm that made the image possible 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. Katie Bouman led development of a computer program that made the breakthrough image possible. The remarkable photo, showing a halo of dust and gas 500 million trillion km from Earth, was released on Wednesday. For Dr Bouman, its creation was the realisation of an endeavour previously thought impossible. Excitedly bracing herself for the groundbreaking moment, Dr Bouman was pictured loading the image on her laptop. "Watching in disbelief as the first image I ever made of a black hole was in the process of being reconstructed," she wrote in the caption to the Facebook post. She started making the algorithm three years ago while she was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 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. Watching in disbelief as the first image I ever made of a black hole was in the process of being reconstructed. Posted by Katie Bouman on Wednesday, April 10, 2019 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. View original post on Facebook The black hole image, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) - a network of eight linked telescopes - was rendered by Dr Bouman's algorithm. "When we saw it for the first time, we were all in disbelief. It was quite spectacular," she told BBC Radio 5 live. "We got really lucky with the weather... We got lucky in so many ways." In the hours after the photo's momentous release, Dr Bouman became an international sensation, with her name trending on Twitter. Dr Bouman was also hailed by MIT and the Smithsonian on social media. "3 years ago MIT grad student Katie Bouman led the creation of a new algorithm to produce the first-ever image of a black hole," MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab wrote. "Today, that image was released." 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." What do we know about the black hole? The black hole, which is "unseeable" to the naked eye, measures 40 billion km across, or three million times the size of the Earth It was scanned over a period of 10 days in the Messier 87 galaxy It is "larger than the size of our entire Solar System", Prof Heino Falcke, of Radboud University in the Netherlands, who proposed the experiment, told the BBC How did her algorithm create the image? Put simply, Dr Bouman and others developed a series of algorithms that converted telescopic data into the historic photo shared by the world's media. In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is a process or set of rules used to solve problems. image copyright Reuters image caption The first ever photo of a black hole, taken using a global network of telescopes No single telescope is powerful enough to capture the black hole, so a network of eight was set up to so do using a technique called interferometry. The data they captured was stored on hundreds of hard drives that were flown to central processing centres in Boston, US, and Bonn, Germany. Dr Bouman's method of processing this raw data was said to be instrumental in the creation of the striking image. She spearheaded a testing process whereby multiple algorithms with "different assumptions built into them" attempted to recover a photo from the data. image caption The eventual EHT array will have 12 widely spaced participating radio facilities The results of the algorithms were then analysed by four separate teams to build confidence in the veracity of their findings. "We're a melting pot of astronomers, physicists, mathematicians and engineers, and that's what it took to achieve something once thought impossible," Dr Bouman says. Figure caption Warning: Third party content may contain adverts