PhD in Deep Learning for Predicting Poverty from Satellite Images

The data science and AI division at CSE is recruiting a PhD student for a project in Deep Learning for Predicting Poverty from Satellite Images.

The position is advertised within the research project Poverty traps in Africa, funded by FORMAS. FORMAS is a government research council for sustainable development. Its areas of activity include the environment, agricultural sciences, and spatial planning.

About 900 million people—one-third in Africa—live in extreme poverty. Operating on the assumption that life in impoverished communities is fundamentally so different that it can trap people in cycles of deprivation (‘poverty traps’), major development agencies have deployed a stream of development projects to break these cycles (‘poverty targeting’). However, scholars are currently unable to answer questions such as in what capacity do poverty traps exist; to what extent do these interventions release communities from such traps—as they are held back by a data challenges. There is a lack of geo-temporal poverty data; this project will develop new methods to produce such data. Consequently, the aim of this project is to identify to what extent African communities are trapped in poverty and explain how competing development interventions alter these communities’ prospects to free themselves from deprivation. To achieve this aim, the project will (i) develop machine learning algorithms to identify poverty traps from satellite images (e.g. NASA’s Landsat mission) between 1980s to 2020; (ii) use these remote sensing derived poverty data to examine how World Bank versus Chinese development programs target and communities; (iii) investigate the extent to which such analysis can be used to draw causal conclusions about the impact of development pograms (iv) using this foundational work, scale up the results from (i) – (iii) to validate them and develop a theory of the varieties of poverty traps and targeting. Lastly, (iv) To produce a statistical package—PovertyMachine—that enables us, and other scholars, to produce poverty estimates from new images (i).

The doctoral student is expected to produce a Ph.D. thesis contributing to primarly satisfying the project’s first and third aims: “To develop machine learning and causal inference algorithms to identify poverty levels and poverty traps using satellite images, of African communities over time and space, on a quarterly basis, from the 1980s to 2020.”

And secondarily contribututing to satisfying the project’s fourth aim: “To produce a statistical package—PovertyMachine—that enables us, and other scholars, to produce poverty estimates from new images (i).”

The project is a collaboration between Chalmers University of Technology and the Department of Sociology, University of Gothenburg. Accordingly, although the student will pursue a PhD in machine learning within computer science and engineering at Chalmers, this person expected to have an interest in social-scientific issues and interdisciplinary research. 

Major responsibilities
Your major responsibilities as a PhD student is to pursue your doctoral studies within the framework of the outlined research project. You will be enrolled in a graduate program in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. You are expected to develop your own ideas and communicate scientific results orally as well as in written form. In addition, the position will include 20% departmental work, mostly teaching duties in Chalmers' undergraduate and masters-level courses or performing other duties corresponding to 20% of working hours.

Position summary
Full-time temporary employment. The position is limited to a maximum of five years.

Qualifications
To qualify as a PhD student, you must have a master's-level degree, or a four-year bachelor's degree, corresponding to at least 240 higher education credits in a relevant field. The position requires sound verbal and written communication skills in Swedish and English. If Swedish is not your native language, you should be able to teach in Swedish after two years. Chalmers offers Swedish courses.

Chalmers continuously strives to be an attractive employer. Equality and diversity are substantial foundations in all activities at Chalmers.

Our offer to you
Chalmers offers a cultivating and inspiring working environment in the dynamic city of Gothenburg. 
Read more about working at Chalmers and our benefits for employees.

Application deadline: 21 October, 2020

READ MORE AND APPLY HERE

For questions, please contact:
Adel Daoud, GU, adel.daoud@sociology.gu.se
Fredrik Johansson, CSE DSAI, fredrik.johansson@chalmers.se