"We know our youth are fascinated with the ocean – shipwrecks, fishing for crabs in Alaska, sharks, treasure, and the mystery of what lives in the deep. However, if you asked students to write about what they wanted to be when they grow up, the terms “marine roboticist” or “ocean data scientist” do not show up. It is our fault because we have not told them that the ocean is a frontier for technology and that this frontier needs them. The ocean covers over 70% of the Earth and provides over 95% of the available living space on our planet. Despite this, we know relatively little about the ocean, the ocean floor, or the life within this enormous ecosystem. There has been a rapid increase in the last decade in the types and capabilities of marine technology. Marine technology is a field that is changing rapidly with advances in robotics, remote sensing, machine learning, AI, and other new and emerging technologies. Our current education paradigm of academic classroom instruction is unable to keep up with these changes. Technological advancements paired with the vast impacts of climate change means that introducing youth (including early career professionals) to ocean technology equips the next generation with the tools to innovate and build resilient careers in the sustainable Blue Economy. Internships, workshops, and hands-on training are all vital in preparing our students to tackle important real-world issues like marine conservation, climate, weather, and other environmental threats. This is the real issue – it is not a matter of filling the pipeline, we need to create the pipeline. Another effective example of how we can introduce the concepts of machine learning and AI to students (and the general public) is FathomVerse (Figure 1) – a free phone/tablet application that has players label real images from research organizations and individuals. These labelled images help machine learning models distinguish groups of marine animals so that AI can accelerate analysis of ocean imagery. This empowers all players to participate in ocean exploration, discovery, and learn about how researchers use machine learning to train AI for marine life identification. There are over five million annotations so far with 62,000 players from 205 countries and images from five institutions and several individuals." Read more