Overview of the BlockNormal event trigger generator

In the search for unmodeled gravitational wave bursts, there are a variety of methods that have been proposed to generate candidate events from time series data. Block Normal is a method of identifying candidate events by searching for places in the data stream where the characteristic statistics of the data change. These change-points divide the data into blocks in which the characteristics of the block are stationary. Blocks in which these characteristics are inconsistent with the long term characteristic statistics are marked as Event-Triggers which can then be investigated by a more computationally demanding multi-detector analysis. 1. Finding Unmodeled Gravitational Waves The ongoing search for the direct detection of gravitational waves using Earth based experiments involves the analysis of observations made at a variety of different detectors. These observations are time series samples of the detector state that are then processed by various means to identify gravitational wave candidates. Broadly speaking the searches for gravitational waves may be broken up into two categories, those searches that are based upon a model, such as the search for gravitational waves from inspiraling