Data Analysis Consultant
Tower Project (Working Title)
Innovation Unit, Office of Executive Director
Duty Station: NYHQ
Start Date: Immediate
Reporting to: Christopher Fabian, Co-Lead UNICEF Innovation Unit
BACKGROUND
UNICEF’s Innovation Unit in New York helps UNICEF’s 135+ Country Offices strengthen programmes on the ground using innovative approaches and technologies. UNICEF’s Innovation Unit creates and guides approaches that are transformative, at scale, for the world’s most vulnerable children. Innovation at UNICEF is a collaboration that translates ideas, technologies, and partnerships into products, services, and processes to bring about better, more equitable results for children. Strategically, the team looks at everything from using new and existing technologies, to engaging in new types of partnerships with external thinkers to deliver better results for children.
The Tower Project is looking to monitor and predict natural disasters and other instances of social stress by looking at new types of real time information such as volume of calls and SMS in cell towers or remote sensing data.
PURPOSE OF THE CONSULTANCY
The Tower Project is seeking a Data Analysis Consultant to conduct a hypothesis test using historical data from cell phone towers (BTS), remote sensing data or sensor data and comparing it to ground truth data. This will look at the Baduda and Mbale areas of Uganda during landslide season for three years – 2011, 2012, 2013 – to identify and isolate unique digital fingerprints or patterns that could be built into a model for real-time monitoring. This consultant will also serve as a liaison between UNICEF and Global
Pulse.
DELIVERABLES
1) Workplan for 6 months
2) Bi-weekly meetings with Global Pulse and UNICEF outlining progress on project
3) Document outlining rationale for proposed methodologies
4) Hypothesis Test
5) 10 page research paper documenting success/failure of various assumptions
6) Powerpoint presentation detailing process
7) Open source, publicly documented scripts/code for any analysis done
8) Build an algorithm/model to pilot in real time
DURATION OF CONTRACT AND DUTY STATION
6 months
Consultant will share his time between Global Pulse New York Headquarters and UNICEF New York Headquarters as needed
Consultant may be asked to travel to a Country Office
QUALIFICATIONS AND EDUCATION
• Masters degree in computer science, engineering, statistics, applied mathematics, physics, computational finance, or other related technical disciplines. A first degree and an additional three years relevant experience may be accepted in lieu of the higher university degree.
• Competent in data mining techniques such as text mining, sentiment analysis, predictive analysis, event detection, signal processing, time series analysis or modeling of complex systems
• Familiarity working with quantitative and qualitative data
• Experience working with cell phone data (preferably from the BTS) or remote sensing data.
• Experienced in working with complex network data to create decision making algorithm and processes
• Ability to package work and collaborate with IU design team to visualize data
• Knowledge of cell phone networks and network analysis
• Fluency in English
PAYMENT
Salary commensurate with experience.
Monthly payment based on outputs to deliverables, certified upon monthly review and report with supervisor.
UNICEF recourse in case of unsatisfactory performance:
Payment will only be made for work satisfactorily completed and accepted by UNICEF.
TO APPLY
Send Resume/CV, Cover Letter and 2-3 samples of work or Case Studies of previous work and your role in it (PDF or URL will be sufficient) to unicef.jobs@gmail.com with subject line: Tower Project Data Analyst by January 10, 2014
For questions, please email unicef.jobs@gmail.com with subject line TOWER PROJECT QUERY