Optical fiber networks are one of the major drivers of social progress and a key enabler of global telecommunication infrastructure. Over the past decade they underwent considerable changes, as consequence of a continuous growth of bandwidth demand. The current growth sets strong requirements in terms of capacity and costs for the operators, which seek to decrease the cost per transmitted bit.

Wide-band optical system presents new challenges: optical components must guarantee performance over a broad spectrum, network optimization is carried out on a non-flat spectrum and with a much larger number of channels, making design, optimization and control complex problems.

Therefore, application of machine learning (ML) techniques have more and more importance for high-capacity multi-band (MB) optical systems. ML is becoming the technique of choice to solve complex nonlinear technical problems, such as advance component design and management of wide-band networks.

The European project MENTOR presents a timely proposal to train 6 Early Stage Researchers in an interdisciplinary field of high industrial importance: ML applications in multi-band optical communications. 

As ML can properly works only when a large amount of real data is available, it is crucial to bring together academic partners and the industry that provide access to the data. 

MENTOR consortium offers the strong industrial commitment of four large companies (CORIANT Germany and Portugal, ORANGE Labs and TELECOM ITALIA MOBILE) that significantly contributed in defining the research and training topics to be studied together with the world-leading academic partners in MENTOR. 

MENTOR will contribute to the European economy by designing the next generation of highcapacity optical networks.