Besides the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, partners on the project are three leading Montenegrin research institutions: Biotechnical Faculty, Institute for Marine Biology, Institute of Public Health; two international universities: St. Petersburg Scientific Research Centre for Ecological Safety and Centre for TeleInFrastruktur (CTIF); and two successful Montenegrin SMEs: COGI doo and Green House Jovović doo.

BIO-ICT mission is the development of modular and state-of-the-art BIO-ICT R&D platform in the areas of sustainable agriculture, monitoring of the crops, forest and water/sea ecosystem, development of techniques for controlling and reducing air pollution, analysis and standardization of food products, control of land quality, and improvement in the public health area. A new pilot system is currently under development. It is service oriented with the aim to boost the application and use of the latest ICT technologies in the areas of agriculture, marine biology, environmental monitoring. This open service platform will be scalable in order to be extended to other areas like health, transportation, smart cities, smart objects etc.

Pilot BIO-ICT system will be implemented through three research facilities. One research facility is on the sea (COGIMAR), while the other two are farms (Biotechnical Faculty and Green House Jovović). These three research facilities are established with project partners with the aim to serve as the basis for future start-up/spin off companies. Investigation of precision agriculture potential for taking advantage of advanced ICT solutions to address today's agricultural issues such as the need to balance productivity with environmental concerns is the subject of the activities. Two approaches are primarily followed: pattern recognition and data mining. Image processing and pattern recognition tools will be adopted for the classification of grapevine diseases and automated pest monitoring. Techniques based on data mining will be developed for soil classification and data visualisation. Mobile wireless sensor networks are examined as advanced communications technologies with particular emphasis on their implementation in BIO-ICT pilot system.

BIO-ICT goals and next steps are oriented on R&D&I in ICT for reduction or environment friendly fertilization, spraying and irrigation, increase of farm productivity, reducing human involvement for laborious tasks, helping to make precision farms more sustainable and efficient ecological monitoring. It will realize IoT/Cloud/Big Data open platform for precision agriculture and ecology monitoring application with potential for extending on different social contexts. Specific requirements that will be addressed include multiple sensors and devices linked with big data analytics and cloud data management. The research will address technological issues in big data application scenario such as wireless sensor networks with combined three emerging technologies IoT, SDN and Fog computing.

Source: BIO-ICT