JavaScript Job: Technical Support

IMPORTANT NOTICE REGARDING APPLICATION DEADLINE: please note that the deadline for applications is indicated in local time as per the time zone of the applicant’s location.

This post is a limited-term fixed-term post.

The position is located in the Advanced Technology Applications Center (ATAC) of the Global Databases Division, Infrastructure and Platforms Sector. The Section is responsible for providing support in machine learning applications to other database sections, and to other WIPO divisions and, to some extends, to other external entities. The ATAC section has developed competencies in machine learning applications, including speech processing, machine translation, text and image classification and wishes to continue exploring the applicability of Machine Learning to other activities.

The incumbent is responsible for insuring that the tools are of competitive quality and offering technical support to WIPO units and external entities. The support includes installing, maintaining and retraining running applications, usually based on machine learning software. The incumbent is also responsible for building a technical architecture, which will be robust enough to be universally deployed with minimum maintenance cost effort. In parallel, the incumbent will explore new research algorithms (mostly using deep supervised machine learning techniques) that can be applied to improve WIPO processes and/or generate new business opportunities. The current exploratory work is divided into three main components: Text, Speech and Images. Text includes Machine Translation and text classification; Speech includes speech recognition and speech translation; Image includes image classification and similarity search.

The incumbent reports to the Senior Machine Learning Specialist in the Advanced Technology Applications Center.

The incumbent will work closely with various stakeholders both inside WIPO and external organizations.

The incumbent will perform the following principal duties:

a. Take responsibility for workflow design and maintenance of WIPO Translate, master the current architecture and tools, explore hardware and software components that will provide the best price-efficiency model for training and decoding in various contexts, study solutions such as docker, cloud, GPUs, and others with a special focus on the adaptability/integration of the tool. This activity may require supervising ATAC fellow(s) and/or intern(s) and/or contractor(s).

b. Stay abreast of Neural Machine Translation techniques, study in depth the supervised deep machine learning techniques, follow the state of the art to be able to experiment with next generation MT, define a strategy for experimenting with one or a few technology(ies) in our context, experiment and evaluate with various techniques for setting the best parameters for specific language pairs, specific domains, and for combining various input source corpora by mixing in-domain small corpora with larger out-of-domain corpora and by mixing multi languages in a single NMT model.

c. Manage the MT backend and its accessibility through APIs. This should allow for the translations of full documents e.g. texts, documents, XML patents and Web pages. The position will especially be responsible for a painless integration with a widget to translate WIPO html pages. This includes pre- and post-processing texts in different languages and exploring new techniques to properly use terminology inputs.

d. Develop methods to collect clean parallel sentences, e.g.: filter/clean titles and abstracts, align full texts using patent priority data, etc.

e. Define the training/development/test data sets, develop cleaning and filter methods on the data and perform quantitative and qualitative analysis.

f. Quality estimation / post-edition: Work on automatic post-editing tasks, learn recurrent errors from human post editions, or from user feedback, to correct MT output and/or provide quality estimation score.

g. Define a workflow for updating NMT models using newly published documents e.g. incremental training and explore online learning algorithms.

h. Collaborate with various WIPO units and external entities to define possible areas of application of new and existing machine learning tools e.g. for text/image classification, speech recognition etc.

i. Advise the team on ways to improve WIPO competitive advantage in AI.

j. Perform other related tasks as required.

Education (Essential)

First-level university degree in Information Technology.

Experience (Essential)

At least six years’ experience in machine learning related software engineering and/or computational linguistics.

Experience (Desirable)

Experience in using and designing neural networks (CNNs, RNNs, transformer models etc.).

Experience with machine translation (especially neural machine translation).

Experience or academic research in machine translation.

Experience in implementing Machine Learning projects and/or making significant scientific contribution in Machine Learning.

Experience in training and using Marian opensource.

Experience with version control systems (SVN and/or GIT) and deployment strategies (virtual machines, docker, cloud servers etc.).

Language (Essential)

Excellent knowledge of written and spoken English.

Language (Desirable)

Good knowledge of French or any other official UN languages.

Job Related Competencies (Essential)

Knowledge of Neural Networks frameworks: (Tensorflow, Pytorch, Keras, …).

Knowledge of machine learning techniques (especially neural networks).

Ability to understand and refine neural network hyper parameters.

Strong knowledge of programming language(s): Java and/or Python and/or C++ and/or Perl.

Knowledge of Unix.

Good analytical and problem-solving skills and the ability to understand and document IT processes.

Excellent interpersonal skills and ability to maintain effective partnerships and working relations in a multi-cultural environment with sensitivity and respect for diversity.

Job Related Competencies (Desirable)

Statistics: automatic document classification approaches (SVN, Knn, EM, ANNs, Naive Bayes, …).

Web/Internet technologies: Java, Tomcat, JavaScript, Jquery, Angular.js, Jsf, Lucene (Solr / ElasticSearch), CSS, HTML 5, …

Databases: nosql techniques, Mysql, Oracle, …

Scripting languages: bash, Python, Perl.

Unix: Ubuntu, Red Hat, configuring Unix remote servers (using command line mode).

Ability to write user guide, administration documentation and reports in English.

Excellent decision-making and problem-solving skills.

Knowledge of IP information tools, products and standards.

Mobility: WIPO staff members are international civil servants subject to the authority of the Director General and may be assigned to any activities, office or duty station of the Organization. Accordingly, the selected candidate may be required to move from time to time to new functions and/or to another duty station.

Annual salary:

Total annual salary consists of a net annual salary (net of taxes and before medical insurance and pension fund deductions) in US dollars and a post adjustment. Please note that this estimate is for information only. The post adjustment multiplier (cost of living allowance) is variable and subject to change (increase or decrease) without notice. The figures quoted below are based on the June 2022 rate of 71.4%

Please refer to WIPO’s Staff Regulation and Rules for detailed information concerning salaries, benefits and allowances.

Additional Information

• Initial fixed-term appointment of two years, renewable subject to satisfactory performance and other applicable conditions. The selected candidate will be subject to an overall term of five years with no possibility of renewal beyond that term. This is not applicable to WIPO staff members on fixed-term, continuing or permanent appointments, who were recruited following a competition under Staff Regulation 4.10 (“Appointment Boards”).

This vacancy announcement may be used to fill other posts at the same grade with similar functions in accordance with Staff Rule 4.9.5.

Applications from qualified women as well as from qualified nationals of unrepresented Member States of WIPO and underrepresented geographical regions are encouraged.

The Organization reserves the right to make an appointment at a grade lower than that advertised.

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By completing an application, candidates understand that any willful misrepresentation made on this web site, or on any other documents submitted to WIPO during the application, may result in disqualification from the recruitment process, or termination of employment with WIPO at a later date, if that employment resulted from such willful misrepresentations.

In the event that your candidature is shortlisted, you will be required to provide, in advance, a scanned copy of an identification and of the degree(s)/diploma(s)/certificate(s) required for this position. WIPO only considers higher educational qualifications obtained from an institution accredited/recognized in the World Higher Education Database (WHED), a list updated by the International Association of Universities (IAU) / United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The list can be accessed through the link: http://www.whed.net/. Some professional certificates may not appear in the WHED and these will be reviewed individually.

Additional testing/interviewing may be used as a form of screening. Initial appointment is subject to satisfactory professional references.

Additional background checks may be required.