Woman Who Media Claims Created Black Hole Image Contributed 0.26% of Code

by senthilnayagam on 4/15/2019, 3:44 AM with comments
  • by artifinch on 4/15/2019, 4:12 AM

    It's very easy to see that this is a publicity stunt (and a quite sexist one, at that). Allegations have been made that Andrew Chael contributed 850kloc, but this is clearly bizzare. Analyzing the git repo[1] shows that this enormous contribution was actually data used to train the probabilistic imaging model used in creating the image. Chael has also addressed this attack campaign on his twitter [2], making it clear that Katie Bouman played a vital role in the EHT project.

    [1] https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging/graphs/contributors

    [2] https://twitter.com/thisgreyspirit/status/111651854496183091...

  • by greenyoda on 4/15/2019, 4:00 AM

    I have no idea who contributed what to this project, but measuring someone's contribution just by the number of lines of code they wrote seems overly simplistic. This was a scientific research project, so thinking of a new algorithm that could confirm a theoretical result may have been much more important than actually implementing that algorithm in code.

  • by webmaven on 4/15/2019, 4:09 AM

    Bah. When was the last time you saw this sort of focused effort trying to dismiss the contributions of a man?