Victoria School of Management

The rapid proliferation of rooftop photovoltaics and behind-the-meter battery storage is creating systemic risks in distribution networks. This includes local network constraint violations, insufficient outage resilience, and enlarged cybersecurity attack surfaces, leaving millions of demand-side distributed energy resources (DERs) to operate without coordinated oversight. Existing solutions (dynamic operating envelopes, virtual power plants, peer-to-peer trading, and single-household energy management systems) each address only partial aspects of this challenge. Based on multi-agent reinforcement learning, this paper proposes a Decentralised Coordination Framework (DCF) that organises the energy dispatch into a three-tier hierarchical architecture. Specifically, it has a user layer executing Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO) for local dispatch, a feeder layer in which a dynamically elected L1 leader applies MADDPG to coordinate community flexibility via a Virtual Aggregation Unit (VAU); and a cross-feeder layer where an L2 leader manages inter-community balancing and market interfaces. It integrates a directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based verifiable execution ledger, Paillier homomorphic encryption, and LLM-based anomaly detection to enhance security. Potential market participation pathway and revenue distribution mechanism are proposed to align with the Australian National Electricity Market. The DCF provides a scalable, market-ready foundation for commercial demandside DER deployment under high renewable penetration.

This conceptual study explores the implications of multiculturalism on the practice and pedagogy of early childhood education and care (ECEC). Adopting an inclusion lens, it seeks to understand ways in which different ideas about ECEC have been developed and codified. In a global context, with competing and evolving values and imperatives, it can be difficult to establish and maintain consistent principles on the care and education of young children. In Australia, a multicultural country, with large numbers of recent immigrants entering the early childhood workforce, these differing views of the child can present challenges with parents, colleagues and the children themselves. This article unpacks some of the contemporary perspectives in Australia, focusing on intercultural collaborations. We share case studies from our own work in teacher education to show how differing perspectives can be shared and celebrated. We introduce multidisciplinary, multi-contextual perspectives on the future of ECEC and aim to bring curiosity and openness to diverse insights on what ECEC is and can be.

The past ten years have seen more attention paid towards diversity in creative industries globally. In literature various initiatives have attempted to capture the rate of publication and reviews of books by authors from marginalised communities. While such identities are contextually situated and therefore may differ between countries, some of the cohorts that have received this attention in activism and research include women, LGBTQIA+ people, First Nations groups, and those of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse backgrounds. In this paper, we introduce findings from a series of interviews with First Nations and culturally diverse authors in Australia, examining their experience of the publishing industry during this time of diversity activism. We focus on the expectations that are placed on them and their creative work as a result of their ethnicity, and the personal and artistic costs this entails. Our results demonstrate that marginalised creators are faced with the responsibilities of cultural representation in ways that other writers are not. The Australian publishing industry is not unique in this but, nonetheless, we suggest that the pressure existing authors feel from audiences could be lessened over time with an increase in the number of authors from culturally diverse backgrounds being published.

The genomic mechanisms underlying natural and effective control of viremia in HIV+ long-term non-progressors (LTNP) and elite controllers (ECs) remain obscured and poorly understood. We performed genome-wide transcriptomic expression analysis (Bead-Studio; 25,000 genes) on peripheral blood mononuclear cells from nine therapy-naïve LTNPs compared with 15 newly diagnosed HIV+ patients before and after > one year of control of viremia by HAART. Only significantly differentially expressed (DE) genes with p-value <0.01 and FDR (false discovery rate (FDR) of <1% were considered for further analysis. Pathway analysis was performed using MetaCoreTM to derive the functional annotations. Functionally significant genes were validated using quantitative real-time PCR, flow cytometry, and confocal and deltavision microscopy. Although LTNP had naturally controlled viremia (low to undetectable), gene expression levels in these LTNP were distinct from those in HIV+ patients with viremia controlled by HAART (below detection), highlighting the critical role and uniqueness of enriched pathways in the natural control of viremia in the LTNPs and ECs. Thrombospondin (THBS1) (R2 = 0.942) was identified as a POTENTIAL biomarker in our study, discriminating between viremic patients and LTNPs at the genomic (R2 = 0.942, p = 2.654e-08) and proteomic (p = 0.003761) levels. The expression levels of THBS1 were correlated with plasma viremia (R² = 0.81557; p = 0.0003761). Our results suggest a significant distinction between immune pathways in patients with therapy-mediated control of HIV replication compared to those with natural control of viremia in LTNPs, as identified by enriched genomic expression in immune activation, cytoskeletal remodeling, apoptosis, and T-cell signaling pathways. Thrombospondin plays an essential role in apoptosis; therefore, the downregulation of this marker in viremic patients MAY OFFER POTENTIAL AS A BIOMARKER for characterizing pathways of immunological control in untreated LTNP, in addition to predicting optimal treatment response in newly diagnosed HIV+ patients.