In 1998, one of the fundamental assumptions in quantum mechanics, that the Hamiltonian describing a quantum system has to be Hermitian, was overturned. The existence of an entire class of Hamiltonians that are non-Hermitian yet still possess real eigenvalues was discovered. These non-Hermitian Hamiltonians describe PT-symmetric systems, which are systems that are invariant under the combined operations of parity-inversion and time-reversal. Currently, it is still under debate what implications PT-symmetry has for quantum physics. Yet in photonics, PT-symmetry can be readily realized by a proper distribution of gain and loss in the system, making photonics the ideal platform for studying the physics of PT-symmetric systems. Indeed, various effects of PT-symmetry such as non-orthogonal eigenmodes, non-reciprocal evolution of light, and diffusive coherent transport have been demonstrated on a photonic platform, and inspired applications in lasers and optical diodes. So far, these photonic experiments have been purely classical and the full impact of PT-symmetry on the evolution of light is still unclear. Quantum evolution of light in PT-symmetric systems is completely unexplored territory with lots of new physics to be unravelled. Therefore, the objective of this proposal is to for the first time experimentally investigate the evolution of quantum states in non-Hermitian systems. In particular, the project will study the quantum evolution of multiple correlated photons injected in PT-symmetric integrated photonic structures fabricated using direct laser-writing technology. The aim is to investigate how modifying the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian of the system influences photon correlations, expecting to demonstrate novel behaviour and unravel new physics. It is expected to find that quantum correlations fundamentally change: for example, correlated photons that should naturally bunch might anti-bunch, show a mixed bunching-antibunching, or even uncorrelated behaviour.

The ERASMUS+ program is the most important pillar of international student, staff and teaching staff exchange at the University of Rostock. No other program enables such a high number of students and staff to go to other European countries and enrich their knowledge in such an uncomplicated manner. The internationalization strategy of the University of Rostock was using the ERASMUS+ program (project 2016) as an integral part of achieving the declared goals and will continue to do so in the coming years. Moreover, it is intended to further enhance the mobility figures in the areas of studies, internships, teaching staff and staff mobility by selected measures (e.g. even more advertisements / incentives for going abroad within the university; more promotional events within departments). This in turn will most certainly lead to a stronger internationalization of the university’s student body as well as for the areas of research, teaching and administration.

In 2021, drug development pipelines last 10 years in average, and cost around $2 billion, while facing high failure rates, as only around 10% of Phase 0 drug candidates reach the commercialization stage. These issues can be mitigated through drug repurposing, where existent compounds are systematically screened for new therapeutic indications. Collaborative filtering is a semi-supervised learning framework that leverages known drug-disease matchings to make novel recommendations. However, prior works cannot be leveraged because of their lack of focus on human oversight and robustness to biological data. This project aims at bridging the gap between drug research and collaborative filtering by implementing a RECeSS classifier, that is (1) Robust: deals with class imbalance in drug-disease matchings, and missing drug/disease features, by semi-supervised learning; (2) Explainable: connects predicted matchings to perturbed biological pathways through enrichment analyses, based on the learnt importance of features in the model; (3) Controllable: guarantees a bound on the false positive rate using an adaptive learning scheme; (4) Standard: algorithms are trained and tested by a standardized open-source pipeline. Predicted matchings will be independently validated by structure-based methods. This innovative interdisciplinary project relies on a solid basis of newly curated data (up to 1,386 drugs, 1,599 diseases, 12 feature types). It is primarily supervised by Pr. Olaf Wolkenhauer, at SBI Rostock, whose team has an expertise in drug repurposing, in systems biology and data imbalance in machine learning. This project will help the fellow develop new skills, and enhance her professional maturity in academia. In the short term, this would yield the first method that fully integrates biological interpretation and risk assessment to collaborative filtering-based repurposing. Long-term outcomes might help define sustainable and transparent drug development for rare diseases.

This is a higher education student and staff mobility project, please consult the website of the organisation to obtain additional details.

The ERASMUS+ program is the most important pillar of international student, staff and teaching staff exchange at the University of Rostock. No other program enables such a high number of students and staff to go to other European countries and enrich their knowledge in such an uncomplicated manner. The internationalization strategy of the University of Rostock was using the ERASMUS+ program (project 2014) as an integral part of achieving the declared goals and will continue to do so in the coming years. Moreover, it is intended to further enhance the mobility figures in the areas of studies, internships, teaching staff and staff mobility by selected measures (e.g. more advertisements/incentives for going abroad within the university; more promotional events within departments). This in turn will most certainly lead to a stronger internationalization of the university’s student body as well as for the areas of research, teaching and administration.