18-Year-Old U.S. Teen Develops AI to Reveal 1.5M New Space Objects

Could still do human work, a random audit and estimate what percentage of them are valid with statistics.

There probably was peer review of some sort making sure it isn't just a crackpot claim given they link his published paper:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ad7fe6

And calibrated against known objects:

"We opt to primarily measure the success of our model using the F1 score as a more robust metric than overall accuracy. In order to ignore the effects of our class imbalances in the true positive catalog, we take the macro averages of F1 score, precision, and recall. As can be derived from this confusion matrix, the model achieves a precision of 0.918, a recall of 0.910, an accuracy of 92.2%, and an F1 score of 0.914. These values are satisfactory for our studies. It should be noted that the confusion between the null class and all other classes is the most important to keep track of. Another confusion matrix is available in Figure 9(b), which is the result of simply collapsing all the variable classes from the four-class confusion matrix into one, in order to study the real–bogus distinction that VARnet is making. The result is a precision of 0.973, a recall of 0.975, an accuracy of 97.4%, and an F1 score of 0.974. When observing the final confusion matrix, it is also apparent that there is the most confusion between the pulsator and transit classes. This is understandable, as some transits, particularly eclipsing binaries of the W Ursae Majoris type, have smoother short-period fluctuations in brightness, very similar to short-period pulsators. If the distinction between the pulsator and transit class were to be made via other methods after a secondary classification step, we could combine these classes for this step and greatly improve performance. By combining both the synthesizers and true positives for the pulsators and transits and retraining the model, the final confusion matrix in Figure 9 showcases the result of this approach. It yields an improved precision, recall, and F1 score of 0.980 and an accuracy of 97.4%."

The Anglophone world and especially the US has a special place in our hearts for "teens". Even though this man is legally an adult, yes, he is still a "teen" for another 1-2 years and that is good marketing P.R. Why pass up such a chance to tout his youth?

I say "Anglophone world" because English is the only language that separates out our cardinal numbers from 13-19 because they end in "teen", and therefore it is somewhat a rite of passage for an English-speaking child to turn 13, and they enjoy special "teen" status until turning 20 years old. That's just how it is. Other cultures have other standards for youth and counting; we've got ours. An 18-year-old teen who develops something cool makes for a better headline than an "adult man" who does the same thing, doesn't it?

Whiz teen did :cool_thing: gets more clicks. Also 18 is adult in legal sense but still not enough adult in doing cool science things, hence any kid before 21 doing cool science thing is in theory an outlier/exceptional, imho.