*FEMALE CANDIDATES ARE STRONGLY ENCOURAGED TO APPLY

*CANDIDATES WITH NO UNITED NATIONS OR UNOPS EXPERIENCE ARE STRONGLY ENCOURAGED TO APPLY.*

Education 

• Advanced university degree (PhD,  Masters) preferably in Computer Science, Social Sciences, Mathematics, Engineering, Design, Data Science, Medical Sciences or other related disciplines.
• A first-level university degree in combination with an additional two years of qualifying experience may be accepted in lieu of the advanced university degree.

Experience 

• At least 2 years of experience in computational science as applied to social sciences, global health, human rights or any other relevant field is required;
• Familiarity with quantitative and qualitative research methods as well as concepts from data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and network science is required;
• Experience using business intelligence tools, data analysis methods, and/or coding algorithms for analyzing social media data or other big data sources is required;

• Demonstrated experience documenting processes and writing reports and/or scientific research articles is desirable;
• Experience with randomized experiments, A/B tests, running advertising campaigns and surveys on online platforms is an asset;
• Experience collecting and analyzing social media data is an asset;
• Experience in communications (external and internal) is an asset;
• Experience in Global Health is an asset;
• Experience in Human Rights is an asset;
• Demonstrated experience working in multidisciplinary projects between data/science/technology and public health, development, humanitarian response or social sciences is an asset.

Language

• Fluency in English (written and oral) is required.
• Knowledge of other official working languages of the UN is an asset.

UNOPS is seeking an infodemics researcher to support the work of UN Global Pulse by running a series of experiments around the COVID-19 infodemic and misinformation, disinformation and hate speech more broadly. The consultant(s) will:

• Support producing regular as well as ad hoc reports around key infodemic trends;
• Assist the team to pilot and report on the use of AI, data science and computational social science tools for discovering and quantifying spatio-temporal patterns in infodemic spread;
• Conduct qualitative and quantitative analyses of digital signals related to rumours and misinformation identified by UN field offices;
• Support continuous social media monitoring based on an adaptive taxonomy for identifying rapidly evolving infodemics;
• Contribute to Global Pulse’s work on predictive analytics to identify emerging rumours and estimate their size, geographic reach, and proliferation across channels;
• Assist the team to conduct sentiment and emotion analysis around particular topics of interest, including the appearance and escalation of hate speech;
• Support the development of a framework for optimizing the messaging provided by UN Global Pulse and its partners to counter the misinformation at the right time, in the right format, and with the right message;
• Assist in partnership development to leverage support from artificial intelligence, data science and computational social science communities in industry and academia in the fight against infodemics and hate speech;
• Apply data science and artificial intelligence methodologies to harness Big Data to improve the understanding of population behavior, needs, and vulnerabilities, as well as to monitor and evaluate the impacts of public sector policies and programmes, in particular projects related to the response to the COVID-19 pandemic;
• Support the execution of computational social science studies involving big data sources such as radio data, online media, social network data, satellite imagery, geospatial data, transaction records, etc.;
• Draft and assist in writing technical reports, concept notes and scientific articles, and visualize data findings creatively in a variety of formats;
• Assist the team to develop presentations of results to stakeholders within the UN system;
• Help to shape the infodemics research agenda of UN Global Pulse in consultation with our partners and stakeholders, including designing individual research projects.

Monitoring and Progress Controls

• Deliver infodemics monitoring reports;
• Deliver prototypes of computational social science methodologies as applied to infodemic-related research questions;
• Deliver written reports documenting operational research experiments.