The Organization

The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT delivers research-based solutions that harness agricultural biodiversity and sustainably transform food systems to improve people’s lives. Alliance solutions address the global crises of malnutrition, climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation.

The Alliance works with local, national and multinational partners across Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and Africa, and with the public and private sectors. The Alliance is part of CGIAR, a global research partnership for a food-secure future, dedicated to reducing poverty, enhancing food and nutrition security, and improving natural resources and ecosystem services.

About the Internship

The Alliance is currently working on improving the accuracy of large language models to extract relevant information from scientific text. However, the agricultural research domain has a lower amount of annotated textual data, making it a low-resource domain. To ensure the AI models are as accurate as possible and to promote the reproducibility of our research, the Alliance needs to annotate a corpus of textual data for training and testing the models. We are seeking BSc or MSc level Economics students to assist in annotating textual data for a Named Entity Recognition (NER) project focused on economics. The data sources include scientific publications, reports, and news media.

Key Responsibilities

• Undergo training on Prodigy, a Python-based annotation tool
• Review and annotate assigned textual data in the agricultural research domain, identifying relevant named entities
• Apply consistent annotation guidelines across all data sources
• Participate in regular quality assurance checks to uphold high standards for data quality and annotation consistency.
• Contribute to research and analysis to identify trends and patterns in the annotated data.
• Report any issues or ambiguities encountered during the annotation process
• Meet weekly annotation targets as set by the project coordinator
• Contribute to the refinement of annotation guidelines based on practical experience

Requirements

• Current enrollment in or recent graduation from a BSc or MSc program in Economics, Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Sciences, Environmental Science, or related fields
• Strong analytical and research skills, with a keen eye for detail.
• Understanding of economic and agricultural concepts and terminology.
• Fluency in English and excellent communication and interpersonal skills.
• Basic computer literacy and ability to learn new software tools
• Exposure to academic research methodologies, knowledge of python or other statistical software will be an added advantage.

Terms of employment

This is an internship position based in Nairobi, Kenya. The initial contract will be for period of six (6) months and is renewable depending on performance and availability of resources.

The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT offers a multicultural, collegial research environment with competitive salary and excellent benefits. We believe that the diversity of our staff contributes to excellence. The Alliance is an equal-opportunity employer and strives for staff diversity in gender and nationality.

The Alliance Bioversity-CIAT is committed to fair, safe, and inclusive workplaces. We believe that diversity powers our innovation, contributes to our excellence, and is critical for our mission. Recruiting and mentoring staff to create an inclusive organization that reflects our global character is a priority. We encourage applicants from all cultures, races, colors, religions, sexes, national or regional origins, ages, disability statuses, sexual orientations, marital status, and gender identities. Female candidates are strongly encouraged to apply.

Applications

Applicants are invited to visit https://alliancebioversityciat.org/careers to get full details of the position and to submit their applications. Applications MUST include reference number RFP 103896 -Intern Annotation as the position applied for. Cover letter and CV should be saved as one document using the candidate’s last name, first name for ease of sorting. The Alliance collects and process personal data in accordance with applicable data protection laws.

Applications closing date: 2nd August 2024

Please note that email applications will not be considered.

Only short-listed candidates will be contacted.

We invite you to learn more about us at: http://alliancebioversityciat.org