Support NLP and machine learning research

Details

Mission and objectives

The UNDP Tunisia Country Office (CO) leads UNDP’s support to Tunisia in the achievement of its national human and sustainable development objectives in alignment with its national Agenda 2030 and the Paris Climate Agreement commitments. UNDP Tunisia works on areas such as 1) inclusive growth and human development; 2) climate action, environment, energy and disaster risk reduction; and 3) support to inclusive political processes, responsive institutions, rule of law, social cohesion, electoral support and empowerment of women and youth. The UNDP Resident Representative (RR) leads and oversees the work of the Country Office, including a total of 140 staff and personnel and a delivery of around $11 million in programmatic support to Tunisia in 2020. The RR also leads UNDP Tunisia’s efforts in cultivating, building, and nurturing strategic relationships and alliances which are essential for advancing and successfully achieving the mission of UNDP. These relationships encompass a wide range and number of key constituencies and development partners, that includes the Government of Tunisia, existing and emerging donor countries, multilateral institutions such as the IFIs, the European Union, civil society, the private sector, foundations, academia and think tanks, the wider UN system, as well as global, regional and national media. As a trusted and impartial partner working at the intersection of social, economic and environmental agendas in Tunisia, UNDP plays a central role in supporting Tunisia’s progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and has supported the Government to develop and revise its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for climate action.

Context

The Crisis Bureau aims to forecast conflict using publicly available data. A combination of datasets will be used as inputs, with text-based data from news sources as the main predictor dataset. Forecasting conflict will help the organization to anticipate risks and prevent crises.

Task description

We are looking for 1 Online Volunteer who, under the guidance of the Data Science Specialist at the Crisis Bureau at UNDP, will conduct research in Natural Language Processing and machine learning modeling. The task will include the following responsibilities: - Research advanced NLP methods in the context of conflict forecasting - Training a text-based machine learning model - Developing a code-base for implementation