• Country: USA
• No of vacancies: N/A
  
• Salary: N/A 
• Organization: UNV
• Gender: Both
• Deadline: 2024-01-22

Details
Mission and objectives

The United Nations Development Programme, Bureau for Policy and Programme Support (BPPS) has the responsibility for developing all relevant policy and guidance to support the results of UNDP’s Strategic Plan. BPPS’s staff provides technical advice to Country Offices; advocates for UNDP corporate messages, represents UNDP at multi-stakeholder fora including public-private dialogues, government and civil society dialogues, South-South and Triangular cooperation initiatives, and engages in UN inter-agency coordination in specific thematic areas. BPPS works closely with UNDP’s Crisis Response Unit (CRU) to support emergency and crisis response. BPPS ensures that issues of risk are fully integrated into UNDP’s development programmes. BPPS assists UNDP and partners to achieve higher quality development results through an integrated approach that links results based management and performance monitoring with more effective and new ways of working. BPPS supports UNDP and partners to be more innovative, knowledge and data driven including in its programme support efforts.

Context
The SDG Integration Team located with UNDP’s Global Policy Network (GPN) offers a menu of services emphasizing direct short- to medium-term engagements to respond rapidly to requests from country offices for support on national implementation and monitoring of integrated policy solutions, qualitative and evidence-driven analysis for accelerated progress, and knowledge sharing and upscaling of innovative approaches to sustainable development. The team’s work emphasizes the application of evidence- driven data and analytics for SDG implementation and reporting. In this regard, advances in digital technology are creating data at unprecedented levels of detail and speed, turning the stories of people’s lives into numbers every minute of every day, across the globe. An important focus of the integration work is to complement traditional data (e.g., national statistics,) with new and alternative sources including digital ‘breadcrumbs,’ satellite data, social media to identify emerging trends and gain new perspectives on issues in development.

Task type
Research

Task description
The team is looking for an online volunteer experienced in machine learning (ML) to support the team’s research in the area of natural language processing (NLP) for sustainable development. The purpose of this assignment is to design, develop and test ML models for text classification in the area of sustainable development. This is a research-intensive assignment that involves doing a literature review, data cleaning and exploration, prototyping and evaluating models as well as writing up results. The research is expected to produce an industry-grade open-source model and a short (up to 2 pages) technical note on experimental results and model performance. Our team provides continued support and advice in all stages of the project. We also provide flexibility in how you spend your time on each of the project stages. Note that this is a highly selective opportunity. Your application must include a short motivation statement that clearly describes how your education and experience align with the task. You should include links to your GitHub, publications or online portfolio, if applicable.

Requirements
Required experience
– Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or Natural Language Processing is a prerequisite.
– PhD degree is an advantage.
– Strong mathematical background is required.
– Fluency in Python and relevant deep learning frameworks is required, e.g., PyTorch (preferred), TensorFlow, JAX.
– Proven knowledge of state-of-the-art deep learning and NLP techniques is required, including but not limited to BPE tokenisation, contextual representations, (self-)attention, transformers, encoder-decoder architecture zero- and few-shot learning.
– Documented research experience or publications in the area are a strong asset.
– Proficiency in English is required. Working knowledge of any other official UN language is an asset.

Languages
English, Level: Fluent, Required
French, Level: Working knowledge, Desirable
Spanish, Level: Working knowledge, Desirable
Arabic, Level: Working knowledge, Desirable
Russian, Level: Working knowledge, Desirable
Chinese, Level: Working knowledge, Desirable

Other information
Inclusivity statement
United Nations Volunteers is an equal opportunity programme that welcomes applications from qualified professionals. We are committed to achieving diversity in terms of gender, care protected characteristics. As part of their adherence to the values of UNV, all UN Volunteers commit themselves to combat any form of discrimination, and to promoting respect for human rights and individual dignity, without distinction of a person’s race, sex, gender identity, religion, nationality, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, age, language, social origin or other status.

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