Data Science support for UNDP's Data Futures Platform

Contract

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An 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.

The team is looking for a bright data science volunteer to support the data & analytics requests received as part of UNDP’s new Data Futures Platform https://data.undp.org/. The purpose of this assignment is to design and build a data collection pipeline for downloading and processing publications from UNDP and other relevant organisations. This includes tasks such as creating web-scrapers, scheduling automated jobs, extracting and cleaning text from PDFs and ingesting data into databases.

• Background in Computer Science or another relevant field. Field of study with a focus on Data Science, Machine Learning or Natural Language Processing is strongly preferred.
• Proficiency in English is a requirement. Working knowledge of any other official UN language is a strong asset.
• Solid programming skills in Python are a prerequisite.
• Knowledge of the following Python libraries is an asset: Requests, BeautifulSoup, Scrapy.
• Proven experience with web technologies like HTML and CSS is an asset.