Introducing the lady behind the first Balck-Hole image: Katie Bouman

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Katie Bouman is an American Computer Scientist working in computer imagery from West Lafayette, Indiana U.S. Katie Bouman algorithm made the visualization of the Black Hole possible. People often call her “the black hole girl” as she played a huge part in developing the CHIRP algorithm(Continuous High-Resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors) which led to the first picture visualization of Black Hole using the Event Horizon Telescope.

The first-ever images of the Black Hole were published on 10 April 2019. Her research mainly focuses on computational imaging, computer vision, signal processing, machine learning physics. She is an MIT graduate student and Assistant Professor from Indiana.

How she grew fond of science

On 9 May 1989, Mr.Charles Bouman and Mrs.Cristina Bouman became the proud parents of their healthy child Katie Bouman in West Lafayette, Indiana. The scientist’s full name is Katherine Louise Bouman. She also has a sibling Amanda Bouman. Ever since childhood, Katie was an intelligent girl with an interest in science. To pursue her interests, she conducted imaging research at Purdue University since high school in 2007, it was here where she first learned about Event Horizon Telescope.

Katie graduated from the University of Michigan in electrical engineering and obtained a master’s degree and a doctoral degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT) in the field of electrical engineering and computer science. The scientist was active in her college days and was also a member of Haystack Observatory at MIT. 

Katie’s ideas were always extraordinary and impressive for professors. Furthermore, she was awarded the Ernst Guillemin award for best Master’s Thesis “Estimating Material Properties of Fabric through the Observation of Motion” in electrical engineering. She always had a tremendous curiosity about black holes. Accordingly,  after some research in 2016, Bouman discussed TEDx talk on the topic “How to Take a Picture of a Black Hole”. She explained about algorithms that could be useful to capture the first image of the Black Hole in the talk.

The journey of Katie Bouman Algorithm: CHIRP algorithm for the Blackhole image

After her doctorate, Bouman joined the Event Horizon Telescope project in 2013 following her aim. She immediately started working on the CHIRP algorithm which helped in image validation procedures used for capturing the first image of Blackhole. Following her algorithms and research, Katie along with her group kept working on the imaging for at least 3 years.

During this time, Katie Bouman also appeared in the Ted talk show and gave an overview of the black hole and how they plan to visualize it. It was just a theory then and Katie carefully explained what they will be doing as an experiment to capture the image of black hole. Who knew it would come true in the future.

Blackholes are very camera shy. Since the extreme gravity of Blackhole prevents light from escaping, scientists were not able to capture a proper image of the Blackhole. This is why the supermassive black holes are invisible and cannot be seen easily. Fortunately, the invention of telescopes like the event horizon was made. 

This accomplishment was years of hard work of not just scientists but astronomers, observatories, and scientific institutions from all around the world. Katie played an important role since she performed various tasks by verifying images, filtering those images, and taking part in a robust imaging framework.

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Finally, on April 10th, 2019 the world was able to view the first-ever picture of the massive Black Hole thanks to Katie Bouman and her team of scientists. Capturing an image of Black Hole is not an easy task since it requires data gathered by a global network of eight radio telescope observatories. The scientists say creating the first-ever portrait of Blackhole was very tricky since it appeared very faint.

At just 29 years old, Bouman is worldwide renowned as the black hole girl and became the Face of the Black Hole project. The picture of Bouman being happy in front of the first Blackhole image went viral in all social media. Even though people signified Bouman as “lone genius”, Bouman declared that it was a result of collaboration and teamwork.

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She even posted a picture of her and her research team clarifying that it was teamwork which made it happen. In some contexts, she was also harassed online for taking full credit for blackhole image formation whereas she herself always thanked and credited her team for their hard work.

For Bouman’s marvelous work, she was recently promoted to a position as an assistant professor at Caltech’s Computing and Mathematical Science(CMS) department. In collaboration with Caltech is given a task to develop a laboratory dedicated to experimenting with computational imaging and machine-learning algorithms. The laboratory will be used for the study of gravitational singularities and other extreme phenomena. 

Katie has also theorized that Black Holes emit a background shadow of hot gas. Her theory makes sense as it fits well in the gaps of data produced by the telescopes worldwide. Currently, her team is analyzing the images to learn more about general relativity in a strong gravitational field.

As of 2020, Katie Bouman net worth is still under revision.  She majorly earns from her scientific career. as mentioned above she works at Caltech in the computing and Mathematical Science(CMS) department.

Is Katie Bouman Married?

Yes, Katie Bouman is married to Joe Leong. Katie Bouman and Joe Leong married in September 2018 in Michigan.

Katie Bouman’s Research

The following are some research papers and activities done by Katie Bouman over the years:

1. Conference papers of Katie Bouman 

2. • Title: Turning Corners into Cameras: Principles and Methods. Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Venice, Italy
   • Published on: October 2017 
   • Authors: K.L. Bouman, V. Ye, A.B. Yedidia, F. Durand, G.W. Wornell, A. Torralba, W.T. Freeman. 
   • Award: Spotlight presentation, “Best Poster” at ICCP 2017
   • Resources:   Paper | Supplemental Doc | Project Website & Code | Overview Video
3.  
   • Title: Population-Based Image Imputation. International Conference on Information Processing and Medical Imaging (IPMI)
   • Published on: 2017
   • Authors: A.V. Dalca, K.L. Bouman, W.T. Freeman, M.R. Sabuncu, N.S. Rost, P. Golland
   • Award: Best Poster at IPMI
   • Resources: Paper
4.  
   • Title: Visual Dynamics: Probabilistic Future Frame Synthesis via Cross Convolutional Networks, The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS),  Barcelona, Spain
   • Published on: December 2016
   • Authors: T. Xue*, J. Wu*, K.L. Bouman, W. Freeman
   • Resources: arXiv Paper | Project Website | Overview Video
5.  
   • Title: Computational Imaging for VLBI Image Reconstruction, IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Las Vegas, NV
   • Published on: June 2016
   • Authors: K.L. Bouman, M. Johnson, D. Zoran, V. Fish, S. Doeleman, W. Freeman
   • Resources: Paper | VLBI Dataset Website | EHT Imaging Code
6.  
   • Title: visual Vibrometry: Estimating Material Properties from Small Motions in Video”, IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Boston, MA
   • Published on: June 2015
   • Authors: A. Davis, K.L. Bouman, J. Chen, M. Rubinstein, F. Durand, W. Freeman
   • Resources:  Paper | Project Website | Overview Video
7.  
   • Title: Estimating the Material Properties of Fabric from Video, Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Sydney, Australia
   • Published on: December 2013
   • Authors: K.L. Bouman, B. Xiao, P. Battaglia, and W. Freeman
   • Resources: Paper | Project Website | Overview Video
8.  
   • Title: Training Image Classifiers with Similarity Metrics, Linear Programming, and Minimal Supervision”, Proceedings of the Asilomar 2012 Conference, Pacific Grove, CA
   • Published on: November 2012
   • Authors: K. Ni, E. Phelps, K.L. Bouman, and N. Bliss
   • Resources: Paper | PPT
9.  
   • Title: RAW Camera DPCM Compression Performance Analysis,” Proceedings of the IS&T/SPIE Conference on Digital Photography VII, vol. 7867, San Francisco CA
   • Published on: Jan. 24-25, 2011
   • Authors: K.L. Bouman, V. Ramachandra, K. Atanassov, M. Aleksic, and S.R. Goma
   • Resources: Paper
10.  
    • Title: A Low Complexity Method for Detection of Text Area in Natural Images,” IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Dallas, TX
    • Published on: March 14-19, 2010
    • Authors: K.L. Bouman, G. Abdollahian, M. Boutin, and E. Delp
    • Resources: Paper

11. Journal papers of Katie Bouman work

    • Title: EHT-HOPS pipeline for millimeter VLBI data reduction, The Astrophysics Journal Letters
    • Published on: 2019
    • Authors: L. Blackburn, C. Chan, G.B. Crew, V.L. Fish, S. Issaoun, M.D. Johnson, M. Wielgus, K. Akiyama, J. Barrett, K.L. Bouman, R. Cappallo, A.A. Chael, M. Janssen, C.J. Lonsdale, S.S. Doeleman
    • Resources: Paper
12.  
    • Title: Metrics and Motivations for Earth-Space VLBI: Time-Resolving Sgr A* with the Event Horizon Telescope, The Astrophysics Journal Letters
    • Published on: 2019
    • Authors: D.C.M. Palumbo, S.S Doeleman, M.D. Johnson, K.L. Bouman, A.A. Chael
    • Resources: Paper
13.  
    • Title: First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. IV. Imaging the Central Supermassive Black Hole. The Astrophysics Journal Letters
    • Published on: 2019
    • Authors: K.L. Bouman was a Paper Coordinator
    • Resources: Paper
14.  
    • Title: The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, et al. “First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. I. The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole.” The Astrophysics Journal Letters
    • Published on: 2019
    • Resources: Paper
15.  
    • Title: The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, et al. “First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. II. Array and Instrumentation.” The Astrophysics Journal Letters
    • Published on: 2019
    • Resources: Paper
16.  
    • Title: The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, et al. “First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. III. Data Processing and Calibration.” The Astrophysics Journal Letters
    • Published on: 2019
    • Resources: Paper
17.  
    • Title: The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, et al. “First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. V. Physical Origin of the Asymmetric Ring.” The Astrophysics Journal Letters
    • Published on: 2019
    • Resources: Paper
18.  
    • Title: The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, et al. “First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. VI. The Shadow and Mass of the Central Black Hole.” The Astrophysics Journal Letters
    • Published on: 2019
    • Resources: Paper
19.  
    • Title: The Size, Shape, and Scattering of Sagittarius A at 86 GHz: First VLBI with ALMA, The Astrophysical Journal
    • Published on: 2019
    • Authors: S. Issaoun, M.D. Johnson, L. Blackburn, C.D. Brinkerink, M. Moscibrodzka, A. Chael, C. Goddi, I. Marti-Vidal, J. Wagner, S.S. Doeleman, H. Falcke, T.P. Krichbaum, K. Akiyama, U. Bach, K.L. Bouman, G.C. Bower, A. Broderick, I. Cho, G. Crew, J. Dexter, V. Fish, R Gold, JL Gomez, K Hada, A Hernandez-Gomez, M. Janssen, M. Kino, M. Kramer, L. Loinard, R-S. Lu, S. Markoff, D.P. Marrone, L.D. Matthews, J.M. Moran, C. Muller, F. Roelofs, E. Ros, H. Rottmann, S. Sanchez, R.P. J. Tilanus, P. de Vicente, M. Wielgus, J.A. Zensus, G-Y. Zhao
    • Resources: Paper
20.  
    • Title: Medical Image Imputation from Image Collections, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
    • Published on: 2018
    • Authors: A.V. Dalca, K.L. Bouman, W.T. Freeman, M.R. Sabuncu, N.S. Rost, P. Golland
    • Resources: Paper
21.  
    • Title: Visual Dynamics: Stochastic Future Generation via Layered Cross Convolutional Networks, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)
    • Published on: 2018
    • Authors: T. Xue*, J. Wu*, K.L. Bouman, W. Freeman
    • Resources: Paper | Project Website & Code
22.  
    • Title: Reconstructing Video from Interferometric Measurements of Time-Varying Sources, IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging
    • Published on: 2018
    • Authors: K.L. Bouman, M. Johnson, A. Dalca, A. Chael, F. Roelofs, S. Doeleman, W. Freeman
    • Resources: Paper | Supplemental Doc | Overview Video | EHT Imaging Code
23.  
    • Title:  Interferometric Imaging Directly with Closure Phases and Closure Amplitudes, The Astrophysical Journal
    • Published on: 2018
    • Authors: A. Chael, M. Johnson, K.L. Bouman, L. Blackburn, K. Akiyama, R. Narayan
    • Resources: arXiv Paper
24.  
    • Title: Dynamical Imaging with Interferometry, The Astrophysical Journal
    • Published on: 2017
    • Authors: M. Johnson, K.L. Bouman, L. Blackburn, A. Chael, J. Rosen, H. Shiokawa, F. Roelofs, K. Akiyama, V. Fish, S. Doeleman
    • Resources: arXiv Paper
25.  
    • Title: Imaging the Schwarzschild-radius-scale Structure of M87 with the Event Horizon Telescope using Sparse Modeling, The Astrophysical Journal
    • Published on: 2017
    • Authors: K. Akiyama, K. Kuramochi, S. Ikeda, V.L. Fish, F. Tazaki, M. Honma, S.S. Doeleman, A. Broderick, J. Dexter, M. Mościbrodzka, K.L. Bouman, A. Chael, M. Zaizen
    • Resources: arXiv Paper | Website
26.  
    • Title: Visual Vibrometry: Estimating Material Properties from Small Motions in Video, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)
    • Published on: 2016
    • Authors: A. Davis*, K.L. Bouman*, J. Chen, M. Rubinstein, O Buyukozturk, F. Durand, W. Freeman
    • Resources: Paper | IEEE Xplore
27.  
    • Title: Observing—and Imaging—Active Galactic Nuclei with the Event Horizon Telescope, Galaxies
    • Published on: 2016
    • Authors: V. Fish, K. Akiyama, K.L. Bouman, A. Chael, M. Johnson, S. Doeleman, L. Blackburn, J. Wardle, W. Freeman
    • Resources: Paper | Website 
28.  
    • Title: High-Resolution Linear Polarimetric Imaging for the Event Horizon Telescope, The Astrophysical Journal
    • Published on: 2016
    • Authors: A. Chael, M. Johnson, R. Narayan, S. Doeleman, J. Wardle, K.L. Bouman
    • Resources: arXiv Paper | Website
29.  
    • Title:  Imaging an Event Horizon: Mitigation of Scattering toward Sagittarius A*”, The Astrophysical Journal
    • Published on: 2014
    • Authors: V. Fish, M. Johnson, R. Lu, S. Doeleman, K.L. Bouman, D. Zoran, W. Freeman, D. Psaltis, R. Narayan, V. Pankratius, A. Broderick, C. Gwinn, L. Vertatschitsch
    • Resources: Paper
30.  
    • Title: A Low Complexity Sign Detection and Text Localization Method For Mobile Applications, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia
    • Published on: 2011
    • Authors: K.L. Bouman, G. Abdollahian, M. Boutin, and E. Delp
    • Resources: Paper
31. Thesis prepared by Katie Bouman
    • Ph.D. Thesis:  “Extreme Imaging via Physical Model Inversion: Seeing Around Corners and Imaging Black Holes”
      Research: Full Thesis, Defense Presentation, Defense Video
    • MS Thesis: “Estimating the Material Properties of Fabric Through the Observation of Motion”
      Awards: Ernst A. Guillemin Thesis Prize for the 2nd best masters thesis in EE at MIT
      Research: Full Thesis
32. 15 Presentations by Katie Bouman

References

Caltech.edu

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