Dr. Katie Bouman

Contributions to this post were graciously provided by CCC Director Ann Schwartz Drobnis and CCC Chair Mark Hill.

Computer science is cool, but you already knew that. You are in this field because you find it cool, exciting, and limitless in its discovery potential. What about the rest of this country? What do they think of computer science? How do we, as proud stewards of this research area, get them equally excited about the potential of this field?

I know.

We (collective “we” meaning computing researchers) helped obtain the first image of a black hole, that is beyond cool—it’s really, really cold at 10^-14 Kelvin or about −459.67 °F.

Earlier this month, when the story of Dr. Katie Bouman, now an assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) broke and the image of her beaming face in front of her computer, which was showing the first documented image of a black hole, the world went wild. As they should! It was a “Herculean discovery” as said by Dr. France A. Córdova, the Director of the National Science Foundation.

From BBC News:

Dr. Bouman and others developed a series of algorithms that converted telescopic data into the historic photo shared by the world’s media. [Her] 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.

And while it took a “melting pot of astronomers, physicists, mathematicians and engineers… to achieve something once thought impossible” as Dr. Bouman said, it was the algorithms themselves, the very bases of computer science, that got us there.

If this is what it takes, then full speed ahead my fellow computer scientists. Collaborate with researchers in all fields and continue to make grand discoveries that will wow the world!

To learn more:

• Katie Bouman’s 2016 TED Talk as MIT CSAIL Graduate Student (10 minutes).
• Katie Bouman’s presentation on April 22nd, 2019 at MIT on Imaging a Black Hole with the Event Horizon Telescope (54:47 minutes).
• The foundation of the black hole image reconstruction is due to compressive sensing.