Almost a year ago, I stumbled upon an Instagram post from ETH Zurich about an internship offer for the United Nations Office in Bangkok, more precisely at UNDRR (Disaster Risk Reduction). The 21-year-old, applied Maths master’s student I was at the time, with close to no professional experience, did not think for a minute I had a chance. For some reason I decided to I read the offer and noticed met all the requirements, so I gave it a shot.

I applied internally with the ETH Studios, passed this first screen, then with the UN, got the interview, did the interview, got the position, each step being a complete surprise for me and I still was a bit baffled (and jet-lagged) on my first day in office in September. Everything was new (and a bit scary) to me and the onboarding process was a lot to assimilate.

I would describe this internship as a double way learning and teaching experience: I learned from my supervisors and my team (the Tech & Design team of UNDRR) how a big international agency works, and what current technologies are used in disaster mitigation. In turn, I got to teach them a bit about I learned at ETH: neural networks, LLMs, reinforcement learning… and how these tools can be used in the organisation.

As I was the first ever data and AI intern, I had to build from scratch with minimal resources and no pre-existing workflows. We figured out a lot of things on the go. The arrival of two other new interns at the same position as me, one of whom is also an ETH student, helped to speed up our work.

I primarily worked on two projects: a machine learning based catastrophic model for fragility assessment during seismic events, which I did alone, and a RAG chatbot based on UNDRR, with 3 other people. We were able to deliver working Proof Of Concepts for both, which was a big success given our modest beginnings. I was also the first presenter of a series of webinars about AI related topics, which are still delivered weekly to the entire UNDRR staff to this day. 

This goes in hands with what I would consider as my biggest accomplishment during this internship: planting the seeds of a proper machine and deep learning service at UNDRR (which was the vision our team’s boss had in mind when creating the internship offers). By the end of my six months, the proof of concept opened up opportunities for potential partnerships and funding to continue the work. A new ETH student is also starting her internship right when I finish and I personally see a real potential in a closer ETH/UNDRR partnership.

On a personal level, those past 6 months were an amazing adventure, full of new people from all over the world and travels around Thailand and Asia in general. Bangkok ended up feeling like home and coming back to Switzerland and its 9 million people (half of the population of metropolitan Bangkok) will certainly be quite the change; that and the price of groceries!

It feels like I took off for BKK airport only two weeks ago but in the meantime, the person I am now is fundamentally different from the student who arrived a bit late to work with his brand-new suit in September. I guess this is how growing up feels like.

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When you start your Master’s thesis, there are a few things you can expect. Spending many days in a dim room with the blue light of your screen is one of them. What I hadn’t expected was that nine months later, instead of sitting in that dim room, I would be presenting key findings of my thesis in a bright office with glass walls overlooking the Hudson River on the 7^th floor of one of New York’s most iconic buildings: the headquarters of the United Nations (UN).

My thesis supervisor, Sascha Langenbach, had been working on a joint research project between the Center of Security Studies (CSS) at ETH and the UN Operations and Crisis Centre since 2021. The project delved into conflict-event data gathered in UN peacekeeping missions and applied machine learning methods with the aim of mapping opportunities and challenges in building an event-prediction system for UN peacekeeping. My thesis and contribution to this project concerned a deep-learning prototype model that forecasts conflict-events within peacekeeping missions. And so, after managing to convince – or rather, beg – Sascha to bring me along, here I was, in New York, dressed in a fancy suit, ready to attend the meeting, stuck on the wrong side of the subway and racing to make it on time.

The meeting went very fast. We had to be clear and concise on the two main points we wanted to convey. First, we made clear that, no, we had not invented a crystal ball that predicted the next war. Second, we underscored the fact that we had laid the groundworks for a system using AI in conjunction with human intelligence. This human-in-the-loop approach resonated with UN officials and policymakers. AI is often perceived – not without fault – as a threat. For this reason, promoting a human-centred design is crucial when working with the public sector, as humans must retain oversight of the data gathering and analysis process as well as control over the decision-making process.

What I learnt is that it is crucial to reassure policymakers by showing them the benefits of a human-in-the-loop approach. This also helps scientists to view applied AI research not just as a modelling exercise, but as an iterative process that dynamically adapts with human feedback and experts’ domain expertise. As scientists, we often question the impact of our research, but this is difficult to assess. I believe that our awareness of the responsibility we bear, particularly when using powerful tools like AI, deepens when we confront real-world issues. It is therefore beneficial for personal development and how the tools we create are applied to engage with the relevant actors and understand their constraints and concerns.

This point lies at the heart of a broader partnership between ETH and the UN. Whilst we were presenting our project on the 7^th floor, Joël Mesot and Guy Ryder, the Under-Secretary-General of the UN, signed a Memorandum of Understanding between the two organisations on the 10^th floor. This partnership aims to encourage projects like ours and to promote technology-enabled social innovations within the UN. It also encourages scientists to engage more with the public sector in highly relevant areas like global peace and security, humanitarian aid, and the SDGs. So far, my experience has enriched me as a scientist who finds working on real-world issues stimulating and rewarding.