For the recently established Cluster of Excellence CoE Bilateral Artificial Intelligence (BILAI), funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), we are looking for more than 50 PhD students and 10 Post-Doc researchers (m/f/d) to join our team at one of the six leading research institutions across Austria. In BILAI, major Austrian players in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are teaming up to work towards Broad AI. As opposed to Narrow AI, which is characterized by task-specific skills, Broad AI seeks to address a wide array of problems, rather than being limited to a single task or domain. To develop its foundations, BILAI employs a Bilateral AI approach, effectively combining sub-symbolic AI (neural networks and machine learning) with symbolic AI (logic, knowledge representation, and reasoning) in various ways. Harnessing the full potential of both symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches can open new avenues for AI, enhancing its ability to solve novel problems, adapt to diverse environments, improve reasoning skills, and increase efficiency in computation and data use. These key features enable a broad range of applications for Broad AI, from drug development and medicine to planning and scheduling, autonomous traffic management, and recommendation systems. Prioritizing fairness, transparency, and explainability, the development of Broad AI is crucial for addressing ethical concerns and ensuring a positive impact on society. The research team is committed to cross-disciplinary work in order to provide theory and models for future AI and deployment to applications.

Pharmacokinetics in the eye is an important factor for the success of ocular drug delivery and treatment. Pharmacokinetic features determine the feasible routes of drug administration, dosing levels and intervals, and it has impact on eventual drug responses. Several physical, biochemical, and flow-related barriers limit drug exposure of anterior and posterior ocular target tissues during treatment during local (topical, subconjunctival, intravitreal) and systemic administration (intravenous, per oral). Mathematical models integrate joint impact of various barriers on ocular pharmacokinetics (PKs) thereby helping drug development. The models are useful in describing (top-down) and predicting (bottom-up) pharmacokinetics of ocular drugs. This is useful also in the design and development of new drug molecules and drug delivery systems. Furthermore, the models can be used for interspecies translation and probing of disease effects on pharmacokinetics. In this lecture, ocular pharmacokinetics and current modelling methods (noncompartmental analyses, compartmental, physiologically based, and finite element models) are introduced. Future challenges are also highlighted (e.g. intra-tissue distribution, prediction of drug responses, active transport).