PyData Skopje January 2026
Start: 28.01.2026 @ 18:00
Join us on Wednesday, 28.01.2026 for the first PyData Meetup of the new year. The meet up will be held in Base42, a local hackerspace in Skopje.
Talk:
Over the past decade, artificial intelligence has become increasingly prevalent in ecology and wildlife conservation. Applications range from biodiversity monitoring using camera traps and acoustic sensors, to animal behavior analysis and species distribution modeling. Despite these advances, our understanding of the limitations and biases of such systems remains limited—particularly regarding how errors propagate through ecological modeling pipelines and the real-world consequences of deploying these models.
In this talk, we will explore concrete examples of how AI is applied to environmental challenges, with a particular focus on computer vision for camera traps and coral reefs. We will then examine how Responsible AI principles can be applied in this domain to:
Identify and understand biases in AI models (across animal species, habitats, and hardware),
Analyze how these biases affect downstream ecological models, and
Mitigate them by integrating domain-specific ecological knowledge directly into AI systems.
About the speaker
Viktor Domazetoski is a PhD candidate in Biological Sciences at the UQ–Exeter Institute, a joint program between the University of Exeter (UK) and the University of Queensland (Australia), where his research focuses on the application of artificial intelligence in wildlife conservation.
He collaborates with the Wildlife Conservation Society on developing AI systems for coral reef monitoring and is a co-lead of the AI for Conservation group at WILDLABS, an international community with over 1,000 members.
Viktor has an interdisciplinary background, holding:
- A BSc in Computer Science and Engineering from the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, and
- An MSc in Ecological Modelling from the University of Göttingen, Germany.
His work spans the application of statistical methods and AI across environmental science, physics, biomedicine, and neuroscience.
Call for presenters
Do you enjoy sharing knowledge and like public speaking? Do you just enjoy sharing knowledge but are unsure how you feel about public speaking? Even if you're not 100% about public speaking, PyData is a very welcoming community and we appreciate any talks about sharing knowledge given by anyone passionate enough to share them.
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There is limited seating, so please register for the event if you would like to attend.
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