Introducing Gravity Spy Tools

Gravity Spy Tools

With the introduction of the new Virgo workflow, we anticipate there being a number of novel glitches, some that will look like what you may have seen in Hanford and Livingston, and some very different. In an effort to help facilitate the generation of large collections of novel glitches, especially when we are not sure what to expect with Virgo, we are introducing a new supplementary tool for Gravity Spy, gravityspytools. For an idea of how to use this tool please watch the linked video. The goal of this tool is to maximize the impact of a new machine learning algorithm that the Gravity Spy team has developed called DIRECT. This algorithm utilizes transfer learning in order to learn what makes gravity spy images similar and dissimilar from each other. This allows every Gravity Spy image to be abstracted into a feature space containing 200 points. It is in this feature space that we calculate distances from one images to another. An interface to do this is provided on gravityspytools called the “Similarity Search.” It takes as input one sample from Gravity Spy and as output the closest samples in the feature space based on distance. An attempt to visualize in three dimensions what the set of known images (such as blip, whistle, etc) looks like in this 200 dimensional feature space is shown above.

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Thank You!

We want to thank all of our volunteers for their continued efforts on Gravity Spy and we appreciate all the feedback we have received. Please let us know how you find using the gravityspytools! As always please reach out to me with features you would like to see!