(October 2011) 

Andrea Kulakov finished the secondary school in 1990, at age of 16, as he managed twice to take two school years during one year (7^th and 8^th grade in primary school and then 3^rd and 4^th year in high school). After that, he enrolled at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Skopje, Macedonia at the Computer Science Department and in 1995 graduated with the highest average grade (9.91 out of 10.00) in the generation 1990-95.

In 1995 he started his postgraduate studies in Cognitive Science at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia, Bulgaria, in a small international group of students with classes in English. He finished these studies with an excellent average grade (5.71 out of 6.00). In July 1998 he defended his MSc thesis “Vygovorotsky – An Anticipative and Analogy-making Actor” with an excellent grade (5.5), in front of an international defense committee with 5 members (not including the mentor). In 1999 his MSc diploma was recognized as an equivalent diploma at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Skopje.

During his 9 months military service in 1999, he was also a demonstrator at the Military Academy for the course “Informatics”. After that he worked for six months in an international software company Mak-System, during which period he was for training in Paris, France for 6 weeks.

In the period April 2000 till September 2011, Andrea Kulakov was employed at the Institute of Computer Science and Engineering at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering (later Faculty of Electrical Engineering and IT) in Skopje, first as an assistant, and then since 2007 as an Assistant Professor. He had taught several subjects in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Databases in the undergraduate and graduate studies.

In June 2005, he won a Graduate Student Research Grant for researches leading to PhD defense, from the Computational Intelligence Society of the largest society of engineers IEEE. (http://ieee-cis.org/edu/research/ little below, in the section for 2005).

In December 2006 he defended his PhD thesis titled “Data Management in Wireless Sensor Networks” at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and IT in  Skopje.

He was a researcher and principal investigator of several national and international projects, financed by the Ministry of Education and Science of Macedonia, from the EU TEMPUS program and from the EU FP6 program.

In 2008 he founded an advanced technology Company for Research and Development NI TEKNA – Intelligent Technologies               (www.ni-tekna.com), dealing with development of advanced solutions where it is necessary to apply the techniques of Artificial Intelligence.

In March 2011 he was one of the founders of the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering in Skopje. In August 2011 he was elected as a Head of the Institute of Intelligent Systems at the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering.

He is responsible for several courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level from the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Data Analysis, Robotics and Sensing. He has published more than 60 scientific papers at international conferences, in international journals, as well as a book chapter. His research is focused in the fields of Robotics, Business Intelligence, Image and Sound Processing and other subfields of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence. Besides his native Macedonian, he speaks fluently English, Serbian and Bulgarian, while he uses also German, French, Russian and Slovenian.