Students learn new skills at: Coding The Cosmos workshop

By Katrine Kompanets
May 31, 2024

University of Minnesota students (from left to right): Katrine Kompanets, Lilia Bouayed, and Emma de Bruin

University of Minnesota students Emma de Bruin, Lilia Bouayed, and Katrine Kompanets attended “Coding The Cosmos: Introduction to Gravitational Waves Summer Workshop”, a week-long workshop hosted by the Missouri University of Science and Technology and the NSF. We learned various techniques for data analysis and processing of gravitational waves. On the last day, we applied all the skills we learned that week to find as many simulated signals as we could be buried in 4000 seconds of data. Not only did we discover 3 signals, but we also determined that they all came from black hole collisions and we successfully identified their masses. We also discovered a noise remnant (known as a ‘glitch’) that almost threw us off. We had a lot of fun and are excited to combine our new data analysis skills with AI expertise from A3D3 to search for gravitational waves!