
Kristen Stewart co-authors AI paper - tomssilver
http://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/1/20/14334242/kristen-stewart-machine-learning-paper-ai
======
rawnlq
She has a defined Erdős–Bacon number now:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_numbe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_number)

~~~
ramshorns
Looks like it's 9.

Bhautik Joshi, first author on this paper, collaborated with Sébastien
Ourselin on e.g. [1], and Sébastien Ourselin has an Erdős number of 5 [2]. So
Stewart's Erdős number is at most 7.

Her Bacon number is 2. 'We learned that Kristen Stewart has a Bacon number of
two because she and Michael Sheen costarred together in "The Twilight Saga,"
and Sheen and Bacon starred in "Frost/Nixon."' [3]

[1]
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220677921_A_quantit...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220677921_A_quantitative_assessment_of_approaches_to_mesh_generation_for_surgical_simulation)

[2] [https://zbmath.org/collaboration-
distance/?a=ourselin.sebast...](https://zbmath.org/collaboration-
distance/?a=ourselin.sebastien&b=erdos.paul)

[3] [http://www.mtv.com/news/2442193/bacon-number-
google/](http://www.mtv.com/news/2442193/bacon-number-google/)

------
madars
Reminds me of John Urschel: PhD candidate in mathematics (MIT) and offensive
lineman for Ravens. Wrote six papers while playing in NFL.
[https://math.mit.edu/~urschel/](https://math.mit.edu/~urschel/)

~~~
shas3
John Urschel is a legit full-time mathematician. Stewart's coauthorship seems
to have more to do with her skills as a director than computer scientist.

------
kobeya
"Bhautik Joshi posted a paper to arXiv on the topic of some consulting work he
did for a short film, and listed the producer and actor as co-authors to
garner publicity."

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Actually, she's not an actor in the (short) film in question, she is the
director as stated in TFA. The ML technique is applied to achieve a specific
effect the director wanted to achieve.

Did she submit PRs to TensorFlow? Probably not. Did she contribute to the
paper? Most definitely, I think we can even go so far as to say it's plausible
she fulfills the Vancouver criteria:

Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or (..)

AND

Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual
content;

AND

Final approval of the version to be published;

AND

Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work

Assuming she at some point revised the paper critically for content, which is
plausible, there is no denying she's on the author list.

~~~
IshKebab
It is _plausible_ that she had some input to the paper beyond requesting the
work, and artistic feedback. But it's definitely more likely that she didn't.

~~~
wetmore
>But it's definitely more likely that she didn't.

Why is it "definitely more likely"?

~~~
ecopoesis
Duh. She's a girl and everyone knows girls can't program. </sarcasm>

~~~
eric_the_read
Perhaps more charitably, because she has no known history of having done so,
and her talents in the acting profession are not generally considered directly
transferable.

------
melling
Someone posted a link to the paper on HN a few hours ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443107](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443107)

Here's the direct link:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.04928](https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.04928)

------
j2kun
We have a new Erdos-Bacon number! (I assume)

------
jmnicholson
Is this the anti-Kardashian index?
[https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...](https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-014-0424-0)

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muyuu
Does she have a background in the field?

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kondro
I look at the comments here and it becomes blatantly obvious why we have
trouble getting women into STEM.

~~~
potatosoup
How does it become obvious? (Not snark, actual question)

~~~
pizza
_Women who do not follow the domestic norm are looked down upon in society.
Beauvoir is explaining that woman referred as “the other.” She states, “What
is a woman?’ […] The fact that I ask it is in itself significant. A man would
never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human
male. But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: ‘I am a woman’;
on this truth must be based all further discussion. A man never begins by
presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying
that he is a man. […] It would be out of the question to reply: ‘And you think
the contrary because you are a man,’ for it is understood that the fact of
being a man is no peculiarity.” (34-5) As for man there is no need to define
what is to be a man, there is no reason because they identified themselves as
the superior part. Man represents both “the positive and the neutral,” which
doesn’t need to be explained or defined, and it is self-explanatory. “Thus
humanity is male and man defines woman not in relation to herself but as
relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being.” (35) Men are the
default setting and women are considered a recessive gender. “He is the
Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.” (35) It is like an asymmetrical
comparison, but masculine and feminine aren’t asymmetrical. De Beauvoir
defines women as the “Second sex” because women are defined in relation to
men. Aristotle referred that women are “female by virtue of a certain lack of
qualities.” De Beauvoir also points out that St. Thomas referred to the woman
as the “imperfect man ", the "incidental” being._

unification of the symbols from current context with this paragraph are left
as an exercise to the reader

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_de_Beauvoir#Existential...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_de_Beauvoir#Existentialist_ethics)

------
congerous
I guess _that 's_ how you call peak hype.

~~~
pizza
Hype is not model-invariant

------
xyzzy4
I doubt she wrote a single word in that paper.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Why? It's not unheard of that an actress contributes to technology[0].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr)

~~~
avn2109
A nonspecialist such as Stewart may or may not have contributed to the paper.

All the evidence we have now is her name on the paper (for which there is
obviously a strong propaganda/PR incentive for all authors, so that evidence
should be at least partially discounted).

I certainly wouldn't consider this (fairly thin) body of evidence dispositive
in an unusual situation such as this.

I'd be more convinced by e.g. a string of commits on the paper's repo coming
from her account (if we were confident that her account was really hers).

The parent's skepticism seems to me entirely warranted, given the currently
available evidence, and I don't think it should be downvoted.

------
gumby
I read this article to find out who she was. I had assumed she was a
noteworthy scientist I hadn't heard of.

~~~
wetmore
Why do people on HN love to mention how they haven't heard of someone
conventionally famous?

~~~
gumby
Thank you for the condescension. It was a request for clarification in the
title.

I am sure there are plenty of people whom I consider "conventionally famous"
whom you've never heard of. That doesn't make you an idiot.

~~~
madmoose
There was no request of any sort in your comment.

