Procurement Summary
Country : USA
Summary : Consultancy Services for Geospatial Lead, Magicbox, ICTD New York
Deadline : 28 Mar 2019
Other Information
Notice Type : Tender
TOT Ref.No.: 31607727
Document Ref. No. :
Competition : ICB
Financier : United Nations Secretariat
Purchaser Ownership : -
Tender Value : Refer Document
Purchaser's Detail
Purchaser : THE UNITED NATIONS INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN'S EMERGENCY FUND (UNICEF)
House 3 United Nations Plaza New York,
New York 10017
Facsimile : 887.7465 - Primary 887.7454 - Secondary
USA
Tender Details
Tenders are invited for Consultancy: Geospatial Lead, Magicbox, ICTD New York.
UNICEF works in some of the world-s toughest places, to reach the world-s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential.
Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone.
And we never give up.
For every child, a connected world
UNICEF has a 70-year history of innovating for children. We believe that new approaches, partnerships and technologies that support realizing children-s rights are critical to improving their lives.
One of UNICEF's Information and Communication Technology Division (ICTD) strategic goals is to transform and build partnerships to successfully implement UNICEF programmes globally through the use of innovative technology-enabled solutions.
UNICEF-s ICTD and Office of Innovation are working together to implement R&D capacity on Big Data, AI and Data Science at UNICEF's core through the MagicBox project. This project is transitioning from 4 years of early stage development in the Office of Innovation to the recently-established Field Solutions Unit at ICTD: a team of experienced software developers, data scientists, and designers within ICTD-s Solutions Centre and Support, working hand by hand with the Office of Innovation on a daily basis.
The Unit-s goals are to establish enterprise support to innovative open-source tools used by field-based programmatic experts, planning specialists, partnership managers, and implementing partners around the world. They work with counterparts throughout the organization to tailor open-source software solutions that magnify UNICEF-s impact by driving better decision-making, promoting collaboration, and realizing organizational efficiencies with modern digital tools.
How can you make a difference?
We're an interdisciplinary team around the world tasked with identifying, prototyping, and scaling new technologies and practices. With our partners, and through R&D cycles, we focus on convening and collaborating on new and different solutions using Big Data, AI and Data Science to:
Accelerate adoption of data-driven decision-making practices by programme officers to achieve results for children more quickly and more efficiently;
Provide operational insights to programme managers, section chiefs, and country management teams to allow managers to better prioritize their attention/efforts, identify problematic partners, highlight data gaps, improve staff accountability, and to respond more effectively to changing contexts;
Enable adaptive management of programmatic interventions, projects, pilots, and innovations for continuous improvement, course-corrections, risk mitigation, and feedback loops;
Enable data exploration and discovery, anomaly detection, identification of correlations across disparate data sets, and discovery of new tracer indicators to develop predictive analytic capabilities within the organization;
Realize greater value from existing data sets by contextualizing with other public, institutional, or otherwise-accessible data sets related to the data-s programmatic context.
Key Deliverables:
We are looking for a Geospatial Research Lead to join the Science team of MagicBox - a team that does research and support product development with non-traditional data (aka Big Data) and methods (aka Computer Science). It does so by combining several disciplines such as network science, complex systems, natural language processing, data mining, machine learning, remote sensing and artificial intelligence looking into programmatic problems such as epidemiology, sudden onsets, urbanization, migration, human dynamics, vulnerabilities, poverty, inequalities and bias.
The Science Team interacts with world class scientists, on the ground responders, private sector data holders and tech leaders to push the Data Science and AI agenda towards the problems that affect the most vulnerable children. Breakthroughs and working methodologies are streamlined to the Development Team to scale into operational tools that can make a real impact.
You will contribute to the development of open source projects that support country offices and UNICEF Divisions, while staying current with the latest technologies, applying them according to best practices.
The exact tasks for the consultant will be jointly determined in an agile way and are outlined in summary below. The consultant will directly interface with the Chief Scientist and Product Manager of Magic Box and will work on tasks/areas as prioritized and authorized by the Chief Scientist each month. Upon completion of tasks, the Chief Scientist will certify completeness and quality of work for payment.
Ongoing initiative that the candidate will be expected to support:
Infrastructure mapping: Using satellite imagery and machine learning techniques to identify infrastructure (schools, health centers) in regions at need to know the degree of service availability, catchment areas etc.
Nutrition and poverty: How to use satellite imagery to better inform on nutrition crisis and on poverty analysis.
Disaster monitoring: Using satellite imagery together with other sources of geospatial data to measure the impact of natural disasters and lead analysis regarding resilience, vulnerability against natural disaster.
Space technology application: explore other topics in space technologies and small satellites including remote sensing of emergency situations.
Main Responsibilities will be:
Point of contact for ongoing geospatial initiatives between the MagicBox team and the main actors in the field (academia, private sector, other UN agencies)
Develop and manage relationships with partners in the remote sensing and space tech field relevant to the ongoing initiatives: identify partners that are developing methods and cutting-edge research in the key area of support. Find opportunities to collaborate/co-create/integrate research efforts. Identify stakeholders within UNICEF and other UN organizations to build collaborations for applying research. Work on producing joint research and analysis resulting in open peer reviewed publications, reports, and working methodologies.
Produce high impact research: In coordination with the Science team of the Office of Innovation, working with partners in academia and private sector to produce high impact scientific work. Conduct scientific analysis and strengthen the research collaboration network.
Build quick prototypes: Produce quick analysis/prototypes that allow a technical exploration of a data science concept to country offices and partners.
Integrate prototypes into operations: support as technical expert the integration of the validated prototypes in the country office operations, putting together technical partners and programme specialists.
Provide technical assistance to the Innovation Fund, Country Offices and start-ups running pilots in the area, including technical guidance documents and reviewing related applications to the Innovation Fund.
Required skills and experience:
PhD degree and 10 years of professional/research experience in a relevant field (GIS, Remote Sensing, Environmental/Natural Science, Computer Science or other applicable field).
Experience producing detailed technical product documentation.
Attention to detail, research skills and the ability to work under strict deadlines is a must.
Specialized Experience and Knowledge required for the assignment:
Experience with the following:
Computational image processing tools: batch processing, feature extraction methods, Knowledge on open-source library for satellite imagery processing, Google Earth Engine (Python API)
Spatial statistics
GIS systems: ArcGIS, QGIS, CartoDB. Good understanding of coordinate systems and capacity to make publication ready maps.
Machine learning and AI
Software development skills:
Experience with cloud platforms, familiarity with MS Azure - as our corporate platform that we use for scaling - is an asset
Programming languages: Python as a must, R, GDAL
Knowledge of open source platforms
Knowledge of remote sensing theory
Familiarity with remote sensing data: Landsat, Sentinel Planet Labs, DigitalGLobe data etc.
Good research record (scientific publications related to the professional and academic experience required)
Prior experience working with a multilateral or UN organization is highly desirable
Language Requirements:Fluency in English is required. Additional UN languages will be considered an asset.
This consultancy will be on-site (New York Headquarters) for a period of 10 months.
Evaluation Method:
Each applicant will be evaluated based on the cumulative analysis methodology (weighted scoring method), where the award of the contract will be made to the individual consultant or vendor whose offer has been evaluated and determined as:
Responsive/compliant/acceptable; and
Having received the highest score out of a pre-determined set of technical skills and financialproposal specific to the solicitation.
Technical Criteria weight: [70%]
Financial Criteria weight:[30%].
Please indicate your ability, availability and daily/monthly rate (in US$) to undertake the terms of reference above (including travel and daily subsistence allowance, if applicable). ?Applications submitted without a daily/monthly rate will not be considered.?
UNICEF is committed to diversity and inclusion within its workforce, and encourages all candidates, irrespective of gender, nationality, religious and ethnic backgrounds, including persons living with disabilities, to apply to become a part of the organization.
UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will, therefore, undergo rigorous reference and background checks, and will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles.
Due to the high volume of applicants, only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process.
How to apply:
UNICEF is committed to diversity and inclusion within its workforce, and encourages qualified female and male candidates from all national, religious and ethnic backgrounds, including persons living with disabilities, to apply to become a part of our organization. To apply, click on the following link http://www.unicef.org/about/employ/?job=520570
Documents
Tender Notice