Artificial intelligence spots gravitational waves – Physics World

A deep-learning system that can sift gravitational wave signals from background noise has been created by physicists in the UK. Deep learning is a neural-inspired pattern recognition technique that has already been applied to image processing, speech recognition and medical diagnoses, among other things. Chris Messenger and colleagues at the University of Glasgow have shown that their system is as effective as conventional signal processing and has the potential to identify gravitational-wave signals much more quickly. Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time that can be observed using the LIGO-Virgo detectors – which are laser interferometers with pairs of arms several kilometres long positioned at right angles to each other. As a wave passes through the Earth it very slightly stretches one arm while squeezing the other, before squeezing the first and stretching the second, and so on.