Geospatial Data Scientist

IMPORTANT NOTICE: Please note that Closure Date and Time displayed above are based on date and time settings of your personal device

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FAO is committed to achieving workforce diversity in terms of gender and nationality

People with disabilities are equally encouraged to apply

All applications will be treated with the strictest confidentiality

The incumbent may be re-assigned to different activities and/or duty stations depending on the evolving needs of the Organization

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Organizational Setting

The Office of Chief Statistician (OCS) is mandated to strengthen the coordination of FAO statistical activities and to oversee the Implementation of the organization’s responsibilities in global SDG reporting. Furthermore, OCS sets statistical standards for all data collection and dissemination activities of the organization, monitors its implementation across the statistical units and provides quality assurance to all FAO statistical processes and statistical outputs.

Reporting Lines

The Consultant will work under the direct supervision of the Senior Geospatial Expert in OCS and in coordination with the Data Lab, CSI, and the technical divisions working with geospatial data.

Technical Focus

Provision of technical support for: (i) implementation of ESTAT project in selected countries, with a focus on i) installation and maintenance of Sen2Agri tool box deployed on cloud or on premises, ii) development of algorithms for the classification of crops and land cover in general using optical and SAR data, iii) make use of both pixel and object based approaches, iv) set up data pipelines in frequently used cloud environments (Google, AWS, Sentinel Hub), v) development of web apps iv) support the development of Geospatial Data Science training programs.

Tasks and responsibilities

• Identify and analyse data requirements for national crop type mapping and extraction of agricultural statistics.
• Identify phenological, spectral and texture indicators for monitoring land cover, crop types and crop yield.
• Preprocess Earth Observation (EO) time series, and calibrate between different sensors.
• Support the design of field survey as well as online campaign for the acquisition of in situ data, and provide quality assurance of the collected data.
• Development of algorithms (supervised and unsupervised) for the classification of satellite data (optical and SAR, open source and commercial).
• EO products post processing.
• Set up the configuration of EO cloud based environments using commercial solutions (e.g. Gee/ colab/ gcs and compute, aws, sentinel hub, dias, etc.).

CANDIDATES WILL BE ASSESSED AGAINST THE FOLLOWING

Minimum Requirements

• Advanced university degree in Environmental Science, Data Science, Informatics, or related fields;
• Three years of relevant experience in in EO Data Analysis;
• Working knowledge of English and limited knowledge of either French or Spanish

FAO Core Competencies

• Results Focus
• Leading, Engaging and Empowering
• Communication
• Partnering and Advocating
• Knowledge Sharing and Continuous Improvement
• Strategic Thinking

Technical/Functional Skills

Extent and relevance of work experience in:

• Two or more programming languages including Python, R and Javascript
• Coding in GEE, Jupyter Notebook, and Colab
• Machine Learning and Deep Learning frameworks and packages applied to satellite image classification in the domain of land cover and crop mapping (e.g Tensorflow, Keras, PyTorch, Scikit-Learn, ts-learn, etc)
• Satellite time series pre-processing and analysis
• Ability to work independently, with minimum supervision

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Please note that all candidates should adhere to FAO Values of Commitment to FAO, Respect for All and Integrity and Transparency

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