Data scientist

The FAO Forestry Department helps countries manage their forests in a sustainable way. The Organization’s approach balances social, economic and environmental objectives so that present generations can reap the benefits of the earth’s forest resources while conserving them to meet the needs of future generations.

Within FAO’s Forestry Department, the Forest Products and Statistics Team aims at fostering the contribution of forest products to help countries achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by (a) improving forest-based livelihoods through the promotion of sustainable, innovative and resilient forest product value chains; (b) promoting Sustainable Forest Management by fostering the engagement of the forest-based industries in the sustainable production and consumption of forest products; and (c) facilitating evidence-based decision making by (i) serving as a clearing house for forest product data; and (ii) strengthening countries’ capacities to collect and analyse forest product data. The Forest Products and Statistics Team contributes to the FAO Statistical Programme of Work by leading collection and dissemination of forest product data, including the work on standards, classifications and capacity development activities.

Reporting Lines

Consultants and PSA subscribers will work under the immediate supervision of the Forestry Officer and the general oversight of the Team Leader, Forest Products and Statistics Team, Forestry Policy and Resources Division.

Consultants and PSA subscribers will focus on one or more of the following technical areas\:

• Advance programming with statistical tools, languages and ML libraries such as R, Python, SQL and Spark ML, Hadoop environment.
• ETL development, Big Data storage.
• Text mining and analysis with Natural Language Processing\: word categorization and tagging, syntactic parsing, word sense disambiguation, topic modelling; contextual text mining, application of machine learning to NLP, semantic similarity, phrasal semantic analysis, text matching and similarity, word embedding, lexicon normalization, named entity recognition. Experience with NLP libraries such as NLTK, openNLP, Stanford-NLP, WordNet or other NLP software.
• Data mining and analytics.

The primary responsibility of this position is to employ big data and data science techniques to develop a range of solutions. In one or more of the above mentioned domains, Consultants and PSA subscribers will contribute to and/or take responsibility for one or more of the following tasks\:

• Harvest forest products data from UN Comtrade and other databases using R, manipulate, transform and perform statistical analysis of harvested data;
• Develop algorithms for closing trade asymmetry gaps and for balancing trade asymmetries in bilateral trade flows;
• Identify suitable big data sources where appropriate;
• Contribute to the preparation of the FAO Yearbook of Forest Products and related statistical publications and databases;
• Contribute to the collection, compilation, analysis and dissemination of statistical data and information on production, consumption and trade of wood forest products particularly by looking at possible web scraping methods using Python;
• Produce a variety of technical information, data statistics and reports on methods of processing forest products data.
• Develop solutions using big data such as machine learning and statistical techniques to improve current estimates of statistical variables (e.g. forestry production, trade quantities, prices, etc.) in terms of their coverage, timeliness and accuracy;
• Develop solutions using text mining methods such as clustering, classification, information retrieval, topic discovery, summarization, topic extraction;
• Perform operationally-relevant data analysis ranging from image processing and machine learning methods; develop and apply new and existing models and algorithms;
• Assist in developing forecasting and nowcasting models using data from social networks, on-line databases, administrative data or transaction records.

• University degree in Data Science, Statistics, Computational Linguistics, Engineering or related topics with strong computational elements
• For PSAs\: 1 year of relevant experience in the above mentioned areas of work and / or fields of application

For Consultants\: 3 years of relevant experience in the above mentioned areas of work and / or fields of application

• For PSAs\: Working knowledge of English

For Consultants\: Working knowledge of English, French or Spanish and limited knowledge of one of the other two or Arabic, Chinese, Russian

FAO Core Competencies

• Results Focus
• Teamwork
• Communication
• Building Effective Relationships
• Knowledge Sharing and Continuous Improvement

Technical/Functional Skills

• Extent and length of knowledge and experience in performing above mentioned tasks and responsibilities in relevant statistical fields
• Ability to draft quickly, clearly and concisely and to communicate effectively in English
• Ability to work independently, with minimum supervision
• Previous working experience with FAO and its partners in the above mentioned statistical domains and tasks
• Working experience in R, Python, SQL and other statistical tools and languages