Oskar Marko, Sanja Brdar, Marko Panić, Isidora Šašić, Milivoje Knežević, Danica Despotović, Vladmir Crnojević and Zorana Djindjica

A team from the BioSense Institute in Serbia has been selected as this year’s first-place winner of the Syngenta Crop Challenge in Analytics. Their winning entry provided a model that predicts the seed varieties growers in a specific region were likely to select. Oskar Marko, Sanja Brdar, Marko Panić, Isidora Šašić, Milivoje Knežević, Danica Despotović, Vladmir Crnojević and Zorana Djindjica have earned $5,000 for their mathematical strategy.

“The overall quality of submissions was at exactly the level of analytical and mathematical thinking we are looking to bring to the agriculture space,” said Joseph Byrum, Ph.D., MBA, PMP, senior R&D strategic marketing executive with Syngenta and Syngenta lead for the Crop Challenge committee. “Very little separated all the finalist submissions—but there was excellent clarity in the logic of the BioSense team’s submission. They put a great deal of thought and contemplation into a very complex problem, and then solved it systematically.”