Vacancy Announcement Details

Background

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is the UN’s Global Development Network, advocating for change and connecting countries to knowledge, experience, and resources to help people build a better life. We are on the ground in over 170 countries, employing participatory approaches to developing local solutions to national and global development challenges. UNDPs core vision is to help countries achieve simultaneous eradication of poverty and significant reduction of inequalities and exclusion.

The UNDP Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) works to enhance the development effectiveness of UNDP to help people build a better life. IEO strengthens accountability and learning through evaluation and partnership. In 2021 IEO initiated the AIDA project. The main objectiive of this project is to develop an Artificial Intelligence(AI) application to automate the extraction of evidence and insights from UNDP evaluations to support UNDP to improve relevance, effectiveness and efficiency of its programme.  The development of AIDA project  is planned in two phases. AIDA Phase 1 was dedicated to establishment of technonly platform for ingestion of evalatuion reports, extraction and classification of evalaution finding, conclusions and recommedations from UNDP evaluation reports.  In this phase, IEO hired a team of consultants to support the IEO internal team in developing training datasets for the   AI models, validating AI output, and preparing and analyzing a secondary dataset.

IIEO has completed the phase-1 development of the AIDA project and it is now in the process of identifying technology vendor to development the core AI model for AIDA phase-2.  The main output of AIDA phase-2 will be to develop an AI platform that can support the IEO to generate insights from UNDP evaluations.  Similar to AIDA phase-1, the IEO plans establish a team of evaluation research assistant to support IEO project team and external technology vendor in AIDA phase-2 development.

Duties and Responsibilities

Under the supervision of AIDA project lead, the Research Assistant will undertake the following duties and responsibilities:

• Support the team during the Proof of Concept and providing feedback to the potential engaged vendors.
• Preparing training data sets as required for PoC and project implementation.
• Support outreach and use of AIDA.

Deliverables

I. PoC, Model training and development of training dataset

• Support project team during Proof of Concept (PoC) implementation phase of section of AIDA phase 2.
• Human feedback to the machine learning model output (human in the loop).
• Preparation of Sentiment Analysis training Data.
• Preparation of secondary of datasets for AIDA phase 2.
• Human-in-loop: review labels and classification applied by AI model to at least 150 evaluation reports.
• Develop Sentiment Analysis Training Dataset with minimum of 500 records.

II. Project implementation

• Support AIDA Phase 2 project team to review vendor output and participate in iterative phases during project development as required by project team.
• Review AI generated sentiment evaluation paragraphs as required by project team.
• Review of AI correlation and patterns of primary and secondary dataset as required by project team.
• Development additional training dataset as required by project team.
• Review of AI generated Insights as required by project team.

III. Support outreach and use of AIDA

• Support project team in presentation of AIDA to different user groups. Prepare supporting documentation for presentation and outreach events.
• Support project team is developing documentation on use of AIDA. Liaise with evaluation and research team to develop AIDA use cases.

Full details available on the UNDP website. Application deadline 25 May.