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Hello there, I’m an imaging coordinator at the EHT (see bit.ly/2v6XuxL). I would like to provide some facts about our imaging group and my wonderful friend and colleague Katie Bouman for the sake of restoring her credit damaged by many inaccurate articles about her.
I first emphasize that she is not at fault about these misleading or even sometimes wrong articles about her. Please do not attack her because of them. See also tweets by my friend Andrew Chael @thisgreyspirit about her for independent fact checks.
(A-1) Many articles implied that her algorithm from 2015 was specifically used to get the first reconstruction of a black hole when many of us generated the first images simultaneously with many different techniques; this was probably from misleading tweets by @MIT_CSAIL on 4/10
(A-2) She is not at fault for these tweets; she was not involved in these tweets and she has nothing to do with them. I believe no one in the imaging group (even me at MIT) got contacted by them for fact checks.
(B) Her contribution to the whole imaging group is indeed tremendous. Just for a clear example, our imaging paper (bit.ly/2uY2Yeq) is co-led by Katie, Andrew @thisgreyspirit, Jose Gomez, Michael Johnson and me. See also tweets by @thisgreyspirit for role clarification.
(C) Katie and @thisgreyspirit co-led one of four imaging teams, which tried independent imaging of M87 in the first 7 weeks. However, Katie was not the only woman leading a team. For instance, Sara Issaoun @SaraIssaoun co-led a team with me, and Shoko Koyama led another team.
(D-1) We didn’t use exactly her algorithm from her TED talk, but her work was foundational along with a lot of other contributions in building the final procedure for all imaging pipelines. It even doesn’t mean that her original one is worse than the ones adopted in our paper.
(D-2) We need to make sure that we can reconstruct these images with more classical or simpler algorithms to demonstrate that our results are robust. As an EHT imaging person, I can guarantee that her technique can surely create images very similar to what we presented.
(E-1) I believe her famous picture with her first reconstruction cited in the following tweet is just only one of the earliest images in her team (even not in the entire group). She indeed didn’t mention this was the first one in her team.
(E-2) There were at least 4 simultaneous and independent efforts in parallel. We split the imaging group into 4 teams as mentioned in our paper. To avoid group-bias on our first images, four teams blindly worked without sharing any information.
(E-3) I believe many of us tried imaging independently and got the first images soon after it. So, no one knows who got the first images from the data set just released. I also don’t understand why everyone is so pursuing who is the first.
Katie is one of the most professional, thoughtful and wonderful scientists I have ever work with. Again I would emphasize she is not at fault for these tweets that might create the current situation. Please do not be misled by many articles about her.
Thanks for reading all the above tweets. They are not official comments from @ehtelescope so as @thisgreyspirit tweets were not. I would just clarify the facts as an EHT scientist. Please stay tuned for our continuous efforts on revealing the nature of black holes with the EHT.
