LEHIGH VALLEY, Pa. — NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, a Lehigh Valley billionaire and founder of payment company Shift4, publicly offered a job at the space agency to an 18-year-old scientist after the teen used artificial intelligence to make a major space discovery.
Matteo Paz received the public invitation after developing a machine learning model to analyze data from NASA’s NEOWISE space telescope. His work led to the identification of about 1.5 million previously unclassified celestial objects, including variable stars, supernovae and black holes.
The model flagged 1.9 million sources in total, of which approximately 1.5 million had no prior record in existing astronomical catalogs…