Connectivity Research

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.

The Office of Innovation is a creative, interactive, and agile team in UNICEF. We sit at a unique intersection, where an organization that works on huge global issues meets the start-up thinking, the technology, and the partners that turn this energy into scalable solutions.

About Giga

Launched in 2019 as a joint initiative between UNICEF and ITU, Giga has set the ambitious goal to connect every school in the world to the internet.  Half of the world’s population has no regular access to the Internet. Millions of children leave school without any digital skills, making it much more difficult for them to thrive and contribute to local and global economies. This has created a digital divide between those who are connected and those who are not, a divide that has become even wider during the Covid-19 pandemic. UNICEF and ITU have therefore joined forces to create Giga, an initiative to connect every school in the world to the Internet and address this new form of inequality. 

Giga focuses on connecting schools so that children and young people have access to information, opportunity, and choice. It also uses schools as anchor points for their surrounding communities: if you connect the school, you can also connect local businesses and services. This creates opportunities for service providers to generate revenue from paying users, making connectivity more sustainable. A 2021 report by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that a 10% increase in school connectivity can increase effective years of schooling by 0.6% and increase GDP per capita by 1.1%. 

We seek a master’s student that is willing to carry out their master thesis on a project that relates to Giga’s mission of connecting all the schools to the internet. More specifically, we are looking for someone interested in computer vision and satellite imagery, to develop extensions to our current ML school mapping work. 

Your main responsibilities include:

Literature research:

• Adapt current ML pipeline to use open source satellite imagery.
• Extend/Migrate the current school mapping pipeline to predict health centers.

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have:

• A bachelor’s university degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence or related field.
• Currently enrolled in a master’s program in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence or related field.
• Experience with Deep Learning and satellite imagery is an asset
• Developing country work experience and/or familiarity with emergency is considered an asset.

Language:

• Fluency in written and spoken English is required.
• Proficiency in Spanish or any other UN languages (French, Russian, Arabic, Chinese) is considered an asset.

Source: https://jobs.unicef.org/cw/en-us/job/578156