Category Archives: Career Opportunities

The Regional Master program in Biodiversity informatics opens registration to students

The master program in Biodiversity informatics has opened its doors at the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences of the University of Abomey-Calavi, Benin, in October 2017. It is at its third student batch from next academic year.

It is regional in that it receives students of several nationalities and national and international teachers (especially from the United States and Europe) come to teach in the program.

The objective of this Regional Master is to train specialists of a new generation in biodiversity, able to integrate threats to biodiversity to research issues to deduce relevant results to inform decision-making on biodiversity in the context of climate and global change.

Here is the link to the section of the communication and outreach on TV that clarified the master program (https://youtu.be/4ajSBF1Jdyk) (it is in French)

We invite you to join or massively enroll your staff in the program in order to meet the challenges of mobilizing and using biodiversity data for decision-making.

Applications are already in progress since the 1st June and we are closing on 30th June 2019.

The program is taught in French and English.

Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon 2019

A Hackathon and Ideathon for Sustainable Africa

The IST-Africa 2019 conference, supported by the European Commission (EC) and the African Union Commission (AUC), addresses a series of societal challenges.

The Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon 2019 is a contribution to the joint efforts to solve these challenges. The hackathon addresses some of the key topics identified by the IST-Africa conference, such as agriculture, environmental sustainability, collaborative open innovation and ICT-enabled entrepreneurship.

The Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon 2019 is one of the satellite INSPIRE hackathons. The hackathon is organised in the frame of the IST Africa 2019 Conference. The hackathon is a collaborative event organised by Plan4all and Club of Ossiach associations and EU projects including EO4Agri, DataBio, NextGEOSS, EUXDAT, PoliVisu and AFarCloud.

DATES

The hackathon starts in March 2019 by creating hackathon teams. The hackathon will then run remotely until the event held on 10 May 2019 in Nairobi where the hackathon results will be presented within a workshop at IST Africa starting at 9am.

VENUE

The hackathon consists of two parts including:

  • a virtual period: The teams will work virtually led by the team mentors. Membership and participation in this part is open to all.  There will be educational webinars during the virtual hackathon to facilitate the progress/collaboration.
  • a workshop (attendance optional for team members/participants) which is the closing event of the hackathon where the results of the hackathon will be presented. The workshop will take place in Laico Regency Hotel, Loita Street, Nairobi, which is located in the city centre. For more details, please visit the IST Africa website.

GOAL

The goal of the Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon 2019 is to build and strengthen relationships between several EU projects and African communities. This hackathon is not a competition. The focus is on building relationships, making rapid developments and collecting ideas for future research and innovation.

TEAMS & MENTORS

The Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon 2019 is organised using an unconventional approach, tailored to cater for cross-continental collaboration.

The hackathon starts with a set of predefined projects. Each project has a mentor (see the list of projects and mentors below). The participants of the hackathon can choose to work on any of the predefined projects. In this way, teams will be built to collaborate on the projects.

The mentors will organise the work and are responsible for the communication in the project teams and will act as team leaders.

The projects and their mentors for the Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon 2019 include:

REGISTRATION

In order to participate in the hackathon, please register at https://goo.gl/VME2ZG

You can join the teams mentioned above at any time between now and the end of April 2019. The registration is open to anyone from anywhere in the world as most of the hackathon is done virtually.

In case you will participate at the hackathon workshop within IST-Africa in Nairobi (10 May 2019), you need to register for the IST-Africa Conference itself.

TIMELINE

  • 6 March 2019 – start of the hackathon, registration opens
  • (Beginning of April TBC) – a series of webinars introducing the teams and their progress. There are educational elements in these webinars.
  • 1-7 May 2019 – preparing presentations for the workshop in Nairobi
  • 10 May 2019 – presentation of the hackathon results at the workshop in Nairobi

ORGANISERS

Plan4all – Plan4all is a non-profit association sustaining and further enhancing the results of multiple research and innovation projects. It aggregates large open datasets related to planning activities in different specialisms areas transportspatial and city planningenvironment and tourism. Plan4all makes sure that open data are easily accessible for reuse, data are maintained and their quality is improved.
Club of Ossiach – The Club of Ossiach is a group of agriculturists, agribusiness managers, agriculture and forestry technologists, environmentalists and agricultural ICT specialists from around the world.
EO4Agri – The main objective of EO4AGRI is to catalyze the evolution of the European capacity for improving operational agriculture monitoring from local to global levels based on  information derived from Copernicus satellite observation data and through exploitation of associated geospatial and socio-economic information services. EO4AGRI assists the implementation of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) with special attention to the CAP2020 reform, to requirements of Paying Agencies, and for the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) processes.
DataBio – DataBio proposes to deploy a state of the art, big data platform “on top of the existing partners” infrastructure and solutions – the Big DATABIO Platform. The work will be continuous cooperation of experts from end user and technology provider companies, from bioeconomy and technology research institutes, and of other partners. In the pilots also associated partners and other stakeholders will be actively involved. The selected pilots and concepts will be transformed to pilot implementations utilizing co-innovative methods and tools where the bioeconomy sector end user experts and other stakeholders will give input to the user and sector domain understanding for the requirements specifications for ICT, Big Data and Earth Observation experts and for other solution providers in the consortium.
NextGEOSS – The NextGEOSS project will implement a federated data hub for access and exploitation of Earth Observation data, including user-friendly tools for data mining, discovery, access and exploitation. This data hub will be supported by a strong commitment to the engagement of Earth Observation and related communities, with the view of supporting the creation of innovative and business oriented applications.
EUXDAT – EUXDAT proposes an e-Infrastructure, which addresses agriculture, land monitoring and energy efficiency for a sustainable development, as a way to support planning policies. EUXDAT builds on existing mature components for solving them, by providing an advanced frontend, where users will develop applications on top of an infrastructure based on HPC and Cloud.
PoliVisu – Policy Development based on Advanced Geospatial Data Analytics and Visualisation. is a Research and Innovation project designed to evolve the traditional public policy making cycle using big data.  The aim is to enhance an open set of digital tools to leverage data to help public sector decision-making become more democratic by (a) experimenting with different policy options through impact visualisation and (b) using the resulting visualisations to engage and harness the collective intelligence of policy stakeholders for collaborative solution development.
AfriAlliance – Africa-EU Innovation Alliance for Water and Climate – Africa is one of the regions most in need of innovative solutions for tackling water and climate change-related challenges; yet many parts of Africa are also suffering from the lack of water-related skills and capacity as well as wide-spread institutional fragmentation. AfriAlliance aims to better prepare Africa for future climate change challenges by having African and European stakeholders work together in the areas of water innovation, research, policy, and capacity development. One of the objectives of AfriAlliance is to help improve water and climate monitoring and forecasting processes and tools in Africa. AfriAlliance is developing a triple sensor approach, combining input from 1) remote sensors (satellite, drones, etc.), 2) in-situ sensors (e.g. official weather stations) and 3) human sensors (e.g. citizens’ own mobiles devices and private weather stations) and co-locating these in an online GeoDataPortal.
CSEOL – Citizen Science Earth Observation Lab – The potential of using Citizen Science (CS) approaches and new digital technologies in a suitable setting for experimenting and generating new Earth Observation (EO) products and services is faced with various challenges. The Citizen Science Earth Observation Lab (CSEOL) therefore facilitates an open innovation process for generating multiple ideas on how to explore the CS potential for validating and exploiting EO data towards concrete, implementable projects. The CSEOL Call for Ideas is open now, on how to involve citizen scientists and the wider public in validating and exploiting Earth Observation data (deadline 5 May 2019).
AFarCloud – AFarCloud will provide a distributed platform for autonomous farming, which will allow the integration and cooperation of Cyber Physical Systems in real-time for increased agriculture efficiency, productivity, animal health, food quality and reduced farm labour costs. This platform will be integrated with farm management software and will support monitoring and decision-making, based on big data and real time data mining techniques. 

The Carpentries is looking for the Regional Coordinator – Southern Africa

The Carpentries is an open global community teaching the skills and perspectives to turn data into knowledge. We build capacity in essential data and computational skills for conducting efficient, open, and reproducible research. Through our mission, we are committed to “training and fostering an active, inclusive, diverse community of learners and instructors who promote and model the importance of software and data in research.” We believe in a world where more people have the computational skills and perspectives to work with data to address their questions in science, scholarship, and society. We aim to build that world by scaling evidence-based teaching, creating inclusive environments, and building communities of practice based on open principles.

We seek an engaged and collaborative individual who shares this vision for a full-time position as The Carpentries Regional Coordinator – Southern Africa. This position will be based in South Africa (preferably in Pretoria, Johannesburg, or Potchefstroom) and will lead growth of The Carpentries community across the African continent, with a focus on Southern Africa.

In this role, you’ll help The Carpentries support our volunteer instructor community and member organizations to increase our collective impact on researchers across the continent. In Africa, we have trained almost 200 instructors and have run nearly 100 workshops in 10 countries in the last 5 years. The interest in workshops and instructor training is growing rapidly.

You will lead our community engagement efforts to develop and support The Carpentries community in Southern Africa, creating pathways for participation and increased communication. You will lead recruitment of new instructors and institutional members, drive The Carpentries’ awareness efforts in Southern Africa, mentor instructors, and coordinate workshops within the region. You may also assist with workshop coordination in other regions of the continent, with support from The Carpentries Workshops and Logistics Manager. You will build and strengthen local communities through engagement with user groups such as R-Ladies and Python Africa. You will join a global team of Regional Coordinators who manage workshop logistics, assist in communicating with hosts and instructors, respond to general workshop inquiries, and support growth of their regional communities. You will be supported by The Carpentries Workshop and Logistics Manager and will also work closely with The Carpentries Community Engagement Lead.

Qualifications:

The ideal candidate for this position is proficient in communication and organisational skills, is confident in working independently, takes initiative, collaborates well in a community environment, and has a keen eye for detail. Enthusiasm for the idea of teaching people to program is also essential. The successful candidate will get to meet and work with a global network of dedicated volunteer instructors. Additionally they will be involved in helping organizations find funding to coordinate workshops and pursue grant opportunities.

Required:

  • Undergraduate degree or at least 2 years in a higher education environment
  • Demonstrated leadership experience in professional or volunteer settings
  • Proven experience in organizing, planning, or administering groups or events
  • Understanding of the need for digital skill building in Africa
  • Some evidence of community building efforts
  • Excellent communication and time management skills
  • Strong administration skills and attention to detail
  • Customer-service orientation
  • Ability to work with minimal supervision
  • Able to work virtually with a distributed team
  • Passion for sharing digital research skills

Preferred:

  • Experience with The Carpentries
  • Understanding of nonprofits and their communication needs
  • Experience working with a volunteer community
  • Experience teaching technical workshops
  • Project management skills
  • Familiarity with one or more of the following: Git, GitHub, R, Python, SQL, The Unix Shell
  • Some experience with the research process

This is a remote position and will be paid by our 501(c)3 fiscal sponsor, Community Initiatives. Compensation will be ZAR 300,000 – 350,000, commensurate with experience. Work space and internet access will be provided by the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) at NWU Potchefstroom Campus if you are local to that site. Access through other partner institutes may be available. You will be working with The Carpentries as an independent contractor and will not be employed through NWU or SADiLaR.

The Carpentries is dedicated to providing a welcoming and supportive environment for all people, regardless of background or identity. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, citizenship, nationality, ethnic or social origin, pregnancy, familial status, veteran status, religion or belief, age, education, or socio-economic status. We encourage all qualified individuals to apply.

About The Carpentries

We’re a team of eleven staff and independent contractors, with a nine person Executive Council. We’re a fiscally sponsored project of the 501(c)3 Community Initiatives. We have a large community of instructors and contributors, and a much larger community of users. We use evidence-based teaching practices to teach the core skills for effective computational and data work, and we promote reproducible research and open science/open source widely.

To Apply

Please submit a cover letter and resume or CV to jobs@carpentries.org.

Application review will begin 19 May UTC 06:00. This position will remain open until filled.

Director of Princeton Research Data Service – Princeton University – NJ

Princeton University seeks a visionary and innovative leader to create and direct the new Princeton Research Data Service (PRDS). The Director will provide overall leadership for the establishment of a strong collaborative initiative with the campus research community, guiding Princeton researchers toward best practices in data collection, data formatting, data maintenance, data access, and data management. The Director will facilitate access to, manage, steward and store digital research data. The Director will be responsible for spearheading the consultation and training services provided by professional research data specialists. The Director will be a visible leader, both on campus, nationally, and internationally, and able to continually assess the evolving needs of the campus research community with respect to data management across disciplines, based on trends in the field of practice as well as the requirements of federal funding agencies and publishers.

Reporting directly to the University Librarian, the Director will also work closely with the Dean for Research Office (DFR) and Office of Information Technology (OIT) to develop appropriate policies, data repository and storage infrastructure for the University. A Policy Advisory Committee consisting of senior personnel from OIT, the Library, DFR, and faculty from each division, will provide guidance and make appropriate recommendations on matters related to infrastructure, security, privacy, open access, preservation of codes, sensitive data, inter-institutional collaborations, etc.

Princeton University is a vibrant community of scholarship and learning that stands in the nation’s service and the service of humanity. As a world-renowned research university, Princeton seeks to achieve the highest levels of distinction in the discovery and transmission of knowledge and understanding. At the same time, Princeton is distinctive among research universities in its commitment to undergraduate teaching.

Essential Qualifications

  • Working knowledge of current trends and technical, legal and information policy issues in research data management.
  • Demonstrated understanding of the data needs of the academic community.
  • Four or more years of increasingly responsible management and supervisory experience in an academic or research institution.
  • Successful experience building and maintaining effective academic partnerships and collaborations.
  • Evidence of significant change management primarily in the definition and introduction of new services in a research environment.
  • Experience in successfully managing technology staff, teams and projects.
  • Evidence of outstanding communication, interpersonal, analytical, and problem-solving skills.
  • Demonstrated ability to function effectively under conditions of organizational complexity and ambiguity.
  • A strong commitment to a diverse and inclusive workforce and work environment.
  • Educated to Masters or a higher level.

Applications will be accepted only from the Jobs at Princeton website: https://careers.princeton.edu/ and must include a resume, cover letter, and a list of three references with full contact information.

Princeton University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. EEO IS THE LAW

Open Consultancy – Development of interactive tools to support the use of data collected by Major Groups and other Stakeholders to measure progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Background

The availability and access to high-quality, timely, and reliable data, disaggregated by relevant characteristics and supplemented with necessary contextual information for its interpretation and use, is fundamental to the successful implementation and monitoring of the 2030 Agenda. National Statistical Systems, however, face many challenges not only in producing statistics to fill data gaps in national, regional and global SDG indicator frameworks, but also in integrating and making the vast amounts of existing SDG-related data and information accessible to decision makers in a meaningful way.

Different actors are often able to contribute timely and disaggregated data on specific issues, geographies or groups, which can supplement and provide additional context to understand the data on official statistical indicators at the national and global levels (such as data on informal settlements or needs in specific communities). Therefore, several important initiatives are being undertaken by National Statistical Offices in coordination with other members of national statistical systems, and in partnership with international and regional organizations and stakeholders from civil society, academia, and the private sector, to integrate new data sources into the production and dissemination of official statistics for sustainable development.

The UN DESA Division for Sustainable Development Goals’ (DSDG) ongoing EU grant entitled “SD2015: delivering on the promise of the SDGs”  seeks to  strengthen and support Major Groups and other Stakeholders’ (MGoS) engagement, including by strengthening their capacity to monitor and contribute to the 2030 Agenda.

Major Groups and other Stakeholders play an important role in reporting on the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. MGoS are often able to contribute timely and disaggregated data on specific issues, geographies or groups, which can supplement and provide additional context to understand the data on official statistical indicators at the national and global levels.

Citizen-generated data, as well as data produced by such constituencies as the private sector and local authorities, faces complex challenges in being integrated and used to support monitoring and decision- making to accelerate implementation of the 2030 Agenda. In particular, it is often difficult to find and link these supplementary data sources, due to discrepancies in the metadata structures and vocabularies used to describe and organize their content, as well as the lack of adherence to common technical and statistical standards. These challenges counter disaggregation, and lead to lower visibility and use of existing data sources that could be leveraged by governments to help fill in monitoring gaps for the SDGs.

Currently, there is no common framework to structure, aggregate, and give visibility to innovative data sources which can be leveraged by policy makers, analysts, and the general public to help implement and monitor progress towards the SDGs.

Objectives

Building on the UN Statistics Division’s existing work in providing guidance towards the use of common data standards to monitor the SDGs, the project aims to provide a common framework and guidelines to improve the visibility, interoperability and usability of supplementary sources of data on sustainable development to complement the work of national statistical offices, consequently raising overall awareness on progress towards the SDGs. Use of semantic web tools will be employed to address the needs for a lightweight data-interchange format across the web

Work Assignment

The Consultant will perform the following duties:

  • Review existing prototypes of SDG data ontology and other related vocabularies (e.g., UN- BIS Thesaurus)
  • Draft a document with guidelines for the implementation of linked-data on statistical data provided through a web API, and for digital text exposed through web documents
  • Draft a document with general guidelines for the consumption of the SDG linked
  • Develop an application to pilot the collection and integration of multiple alternative data sources in one

Duration of contract

The proposed duration of the contract is for 3 months starting in November 2018.

Duty Station or Location of Assignment

The consultant is not required to work in a UN office, but must be available for regular phone and web conference meetings with DSDG, UNSD and project partners during office hours. Travel or commute time to and from the United Nations Headquarters, as well as related expenses, are not part of the consultancy.

Travel

The Consultant is not required to travel for the performance of the assignment.

Expected outputs*

The consultant will develop the following deliverables:

  • The following set of on-line guidelines (to be delivered in the form of GitHub wiki pages, Jupyter notebook(s) or similar on-line documents):
    • Guidelines for the practical implementation of semantic web standards (JSON_LD, microdata or any other linked data artifact) to achieve the greatest exposure of SDG statistical data, using unique URIs defined in various publicly available ontologies and
    • General guidelines for the consumption of the SDG linked (to be delivered in a word document)
  • An application to pilot the collection and integration of multiple alternative data sources with official SDG statistics in one This application will use the linked data infrastructure created to connect nontraditional data sources with official statistical data.

Delivery dates of output

  • First progress report submitted by 15 December 2018
  • Second progress report submitted by 15 January 2018
  • All outputs submitted by 15 February 2019.

Performance indicators

  • Timely delivery of all components specified;
  • Quality of the documentation and tutorials developed;
  • Effectiveness of solution provided on an architectural level;
  • Timely preparation of all activities and regular progress updates;

Qualifications

  • Fluency in English
  • An advanced degree in the field of data or information science or related fields
  • A minimum of five years of working experience on information science including experience in the use of linked data and semantic web
  • Demonstrated experience in the implementation of linked data projects using common linked data standards, such as RDFa, JSON_LD, Mircodata or other linked data technologies
  • Familiarity with the N. Sustainable Development Goals and monitoring framework
  • Knowledge of Agile methodology is desirable

Interested Applicants

Please send your CV, Cover Letter and financial proposal (daily fee) by 19 October 2018 to:

Ms. Nan Jiang, Division for Sustainable Development Goals, UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs  jiang2n@un.org; +19173674426