Faced With A Data Deluge, Astronomers Turn To Automation - AI Summary

Specifically, Huerta and his then graduate student Daniel George pioneered the use of so-called convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are a type of deep-learning algorithm, to detect and decipher gravitational-wave signals in real time. Roughly speaking, training or teaching a deep-learning system involves feeding it data that are already categorized--say, images of galaxies obscured by lots of noise--and getting the network to identify the patterns in the data correctly. After their initial success with CNNs, Huerta and George, along with Huerta's graduate student Hongyu Shen, scaled up this effort, designing deep-learning algorithms that were trained on supercomputers using millions of simulated signatures of gravitational waves mixed in with noise derived from previous observing runs of Advanced LIGO--an upgrade to LIGO completed in 2015. For instance, Adam Rebei, a high school student in Huerta's group, showed in a recent study that deep learning can identify the complex gravitational-wave signals produced by the merger of black holes in eccentric orbits--something LIGO's traditional algorithms cannot do in real time. In a preprint paper last September, Nicholas Choma of New York University and his colleagues reported the development of a special type of deep-learning algorithm called a graph neural network, whose connections and architecture take advantage of the spatial geometry of the sensors in the ice and the fact that only a few sensors see the light from any given muon track.