One of the more famous brains behind the first black hole picture is an invited speaker to the world’s largest supercomputing conference this year.
Assistant Professor Katie Bouman of Caltech, USA, is one of 12 invited speakers with a 50/50 gender split for SC19, being held in Denver, Colorado, USA, 17–22 November.
RCC Director Prof. David Abramson, as the Vice-Chair of SC19's invited speakers committee, worked with chair, Prof. Manish Parashar of Computer Science at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey University, to confirm the lineup.
“We’re really pleased with the diversity of invited speakers. We’ve not only achieved gender parity, but have speakers from Asia, Europe and industry as well as academia and government,” said Prof. Abramson.
As a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Dr Bouman, (now an Assistant Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at CalTech), headed the creation of an algorithm that would eventually lead to an image of a supermassive black hole being captured for the first time.
Although she was among a team of 200 global researchers who contributed to the breakthrough, Dr Bouman became the face of the discovery in both social and traditional media.
“We are delighted to have Katie speaking. She epitomises the translational and multi-disciplinary aspects of her work and is a great exemplar of gender diversity in a very male dominated field,” said Prof. Abramson.
“This year Manish and I placed a special emphasis on what we are calling ‘Translational Computer Science’ (TCS). Like its counterpart, Translational Medicine, TCS focuses on taking computer science research into practice. In some way, each of the invited talks has achieved a degree of translation”.
An upcoming special issue of IEEE Computer will contain an article by Prof. Abramson and Prof. Parashar about TCS and will be available before SC19.
See the full list of SC19’s invited speakers.
