4th INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM FOR AGRICULTURE AND FOOD
PANEL DISCUSSION
Co-organized by the
Faculty of Agricultural Sciences and Food – Skopje
and the
Swiss funded Increasing Market Employability Program
DIGITAL AGRICULTURE AND SMART SPECIALIZATION
14 October 2022
11.00-13.00
Hotel Metropol, Ohrid
Time | Programme Panel Discussion on Digital Agriculture and Smart Specialization |
9.00-11.00 | Registration of participants |
11.00-11.10 | Official Opening remarks – Prof. Dr. Vjekoslav Tanaskovijk, Dean of the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences and Food-Skopje – Mr. Fatmir Bitikji, Deputy of the Prime Minister in charge for economic issues, coordination of economic departments and investments |
11.10-12.30 | Panel Discussion on Digital Agriculture and Smart Specialization Moderator: Prof. Dr. Ordan Cukaliev, Faculty of Agricultural Sciences and Foo-Skopje Panelists: – Prof. Dr. Zdenko Lončarić, Faculty of Agro Biotechnical Sciences, University Josip Juraj Strossmayer in Osijek – Prof. Dr. Aleksandra Martinovska Stojcheska, Faculty of Agricultural Sciences and Food, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje – Prof. Dr. Vladimir Atanasovski, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje – Prof. Dr. Aleksandar Sedlar, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Novi Sad – Ms. Milica Trajković, BioSense Institute – Prof. Dr. Giovanni Aloisio, University of Salento, Supercomputing Center-CMCC – Mr. Goran Damovski, Swiss funded Increasing Market Employability Program in North Macedonia |
12.30-12.45 | Applications of digitalization in agriculture – invited companies presentation |
12.45-13.00 | Symposium closing ceremony |
Dr. Ordan Chukaliev is a full professor in Irrigation of Agricultural Crops, at the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences and Food-Skopje, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. Since 2020 Prof. Chukaliev holds the position of Vice-Rector for International Cooperation of Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. He also has been a Dean of the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences and Food, during the period 2004-2009 and Vice Dean for International Cooperation of the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences and Food, during the period, 2000-2004. His main field of expertise is in Irrigation of Agricultural Crops, Climate Change in Agriculture, Environmentally friendly agriculture, and Digital transformation of agriculture. His scientific experience has been proven by working in many countries, such as Macedonia, Italy, Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia. During his 36 years of professional experience in higher education, research, and consultancy in irrigation of agricultural crops, climate change, agri-environment, crop yield forecasting, digitalization of agriculture, and Management of Higher Education Institutions, he has also been a Senior Researcher at the Joint Research Center of the European Commission in Ispra, Italy, acted as Team leader or participant in 44 international and 12 national projects, and published 157 scientific and technical papers, proceedings, and books.
Prof. Chukaliev’s initial steps in digitalization were during the early nineties in his master’s and Ph.D. studies by developing a digital tool and mathematical model for soil water balancing and innovative pulse irrigation for air humidity control in the crop canopy using sensor-based automation. Later he was working on the development of the low-cost automated weather station, soil moisture sensors, NDVI camera, and UAV. Also, he was working on the development of digital expert systems for advising farmers on irrigation scheduling in the country (Resen, Bitola, Strumica, Radovish) and in Kosovo. Moreover, he has developed several irrigation scenarios for crop yield modeling. Latest he worked on the Machine Learning based tool for early crop yield forecasting and edited the publication Digital Transformation, Data and AI in the Western Balkans.
Dr. Zdenko Lončarić, born in 1964 in Osijek, is a full professor tenure at the Faculty of Agrobiotechnical Sciences Osijek, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University in Osijek, Croatia, where he has been employed since 1992. The scientific-teaching activity is focused on Plant Nutrition, Fertilization, Ecophysiology and Modeling. At his home faculty, he held the positions of vice-dean for teaching and quality management, vice-dean for science, head of the Department of Agroecology, chairman of the Department of Plant Nutrition, he is currently the head of the graduate study in English Digital Agriculture, and at the Križevci College of Agriculture he held the position of president of the Administrative Council. He is currently the leader of two projects of the Ministry of Science of the Republic of Croatia financed by EU funds, and he has managed several national and bilateral scientific projects. Recent scientific activity is focused on biofortification, fertilization and decision support systems in the digitization of agriculture. He participated in the publication of more than 580 contributions (scientific and expert papers, abstracts, books, textbooks and manuals), along with 93 publications indexed in Web of Science and SCOPUS. He supervised 5 dissertations as a mentor, and 3 dissertations as a co-mentor. He is the initiator and director of the Center for Applied Life Sciences Healthy Food Chain company for research and development with the aim of transferring research results to the production sector. He has been the head of the university graduate study program in English Digital Agriculture since 2021, within which he is the coordinator of the courses Introduction to Digital Agriculture and Fertilization in Sustainable Agriculture. He has been developing computer decision support systems in the field of fertilization since his graduation thesis in 1989, and agroecosystem modeling since his dissertation in 1999. More recently, he has been participating in the development of crowdsourcing systems.
Dr. Aleksandra Martinovska Stojcheska is full Professor and currently Head of the Institute of Agricultural Economics at the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences and Food, University Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Skopje. Her research interests are in the area of economic and technical performance in agriculture, efficiency and productivity analysis, cost of production, cost-benefit analysis, and also farmer behavior in decision-making and strategic choices, economic aspects of climate change, as well as agricultural and rural development policy. Involved in various national and international research and applicative activities. She is member of the National Council for Higher Education and Research; National IPARD Monitoring Committee; National Liaison to the European Association of Agricultural Economics; key expert in the National Convention for the EU – MK; and coordinator of the EDP Smart Specialisation S3 domain on Smart agriculture and food with higher added value.
Dr. Vladimir Atanasovski is a full professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies (FEEIT), Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. He currently serves as a Vice Dean for Finances and Cooperation with the Industry at FEEIT and is a Managing Director of the Center for Technology Transfer and Innovations (INNOFEIT). He received his PhD from Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje in 2010 working on traffic engineering and resource management in cognitive radio networks. His current research interests include next generation wireless systems (5G and beyond) and Internet-of-Things (IoT) with potential applications in interdisciplinary fields. He was part of the team that developed SmartWine, a commercial product in the portfolio of Makedonski Telekom (subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom) that provides an end-to-end solution for real-time monitoring of vineyards using a wireless sensor network. He is involved in numerous projects with companies developing various IoT solutions.
Dr. Giovanni Aloisio is Emeritus professor of Information Processing Systems at the Dept. of Innovation Engineering of the University of Salento, Lecce, Italy. Former director of the “Advanced Scientific Computing” (ASC) Division at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC), he is now part of the CMCC Strategic Board and Director of the CMCC Supercomputing Center. His expertise concerns high performance computing, grid & cloud computing, distributed data management and Machine Learning. He has been involved in several EU projects so far. He has also contributed to the IESP (International Exascale Software Project) exascale roadmap. He has been the chair of the European panel of experts on WCES that contributed to the PRACE strategic document “The Scientific Case for HPC in Europe 2015-2020”. He is a member of the ENES HPC Task Force and of both NEMO and SHYFEM Steering Committees. He is the author of more than 150 papers in refereed journals on high performance computing, grid & cloud computing and distributed data management.
Dr. Aleksandar Sedlar is a full professor at the Department of Agricultural Engineering, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Novi Sad. Currently, he act as Chief of MSc course on Precision Farming. His main field of expertise is in pesticide application equipment, machinery in orchard, vineyards, forestry and water management, and in the field of precise farming. Professor Sedlar is a member of Serbian Scientific Society of Agricultural Engineering, Vojvodinian Society of Agricultural Engineering, Serbian Society for Plant Protection and the Scientific Board of European group for Standardized Procedure for Sprayer Inspection. Till 2015, Professor Sedlar is also an editor of the journal “Contemporary Agricultural Engineering”.
Mr. Goran Damovski brings more than 20 years’ experience in developing economic growth projects and competitiveness enhancement programs in Macedonia, the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Caucuses. He has been managing market system and value chain development programs, integrated supply chain coordination strategies and export market expansion programs for SMEs. Mr. Damovski has been holding Chief of Party, Deputy Chief of Party, Agribusiness Team Leader and Senior Marketing and SME Development positions under USAID financed projects, Supply Chain Integration officer for IFAD – International Fund for Agricultural Development. Currently, Mr. Damovski serves as a Team Leader for the Swiss funded Increasing Market Employability Program in N. Macedonia, supporting job creation and increasing incomes through inclusive development in the Sustainable Agriculture, Active Tourism, and the ICT sector.
Ms. Milica Trajkovic is a certified PMI project manager professional (PMP), experienced in EU funded projects focused on Digital Agriculture and development of ICTs for AgriFood value chain. As a Head of Business Development Department, she is responsible for building new and maintaining fruitful partnership network of the Institute both with industry and academia in Serbia and across Europe. Milica manages multi-national and cross-sectoral consortia, supports Institute in new project preparations (from an idea to design and proposal establishment) and brings AgTech market trends closer to the BioSense scientists. One of her goals is to foster entrepreneurial mentality among Institutes’ employees and support them in their own entrepreneurship endeavors. In addition, she facilitates business acceleration for high-tech startups, SMEs and web entrepreneurs from the region with the main aim to bring start-up tech community closer to the AgriFood sector.
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