Paid Internship

Jun 05 2023

 The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) seeks an Intern for a full-time, 3 months appointment in its Natural Resources and Resilience Unit (NRR). The intern will provide research support for the CGIAR Research Initiatives on National Policies and Strategies (NPS) and Digital Innovation (DI), under the “Customization of an AI-powered chatbot for food policy recommendations” project. The internship provides the opportunity to develop the following skills within the context of an international research and development organization:

Knowledge on the sustainable management of natural resources for climate-resilient agrifood systems in the developing world

Knowledge on IFPRI’s country strategy support programs in African countries and how they support the countries’ policymaking processes.

Applying human-centered design approaches to pilot a human-machine interface that can support policy analysts to draft food security strategies by applying artificial intelligence approaches to analyze IFPRI’s research outputs.

Creating a full-text repository of specified literature and studies to be integrated into the chatbot. 

Developing a process for IFPRI to integrate new literature and studies into the repository. Customizing (or creating) an AI-powered chatbot prototype, leveraging a large language model, fine-tuned using the provided repository of text data, to draft recommendations on food policy topics relevant to agrifood systems in Kenya. 

Creating a user-friendly front-end interface for the chatbot.

Testing the chatbot prototype with a focus group and optimizing it for better functionality.

Training IFPRI staff on how to maintain the back-end system, including the incorporation of new data into the fine-tuning process, and how to improve the user experience on the front-end interface of the chatbot.

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, data science, or related fields.

Expertise and experience in programming in Python.

Experience in implementing machine learning techniques for big data analysis, particularly with text data.

Experience in implementing new AI methods in areas such as machine learning and natural language processing.

Familiarity with agriculture and food policy topics in the developing world.

Familiarity with fine-tuning large language models, developing their applications, and deploying them to cloud-based development and production environments.

Familiarity with developing and customizing chatbots.

Experience in creating training manuals for non-technical audiences for using AI (or other quantitative) tools.

Experience working on computer programming projects in teams and using collaboration tools such as GitHub.

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) is an equal employment opportunity employer – F/M/Disability/Vet/Sexual Orientation/Gender Identity.