MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2020 · 2020-01

Do binding proteins allow cyanobacteria to scavenge diverse nutrients? Marine cyanobacteria are abundant primary producers that underlie the entire marine food web. They encode a diverse range of predicted nutrient uptake systems that are highly conserved, suggesting these transporters play critical roles in their success in diverse marine ecosystems. However, there is very limited data regarding their function, specificity and ecological importance. Using our pioneering combinatorial approach, we will undertake systematic functional characterisation of these nutrient uptake systems and determine their physiological and ecological importance. Our integrative science will provide a molecules-to-ecosystems understanding of cyanobacterial nutrient acquisition. Field of research: 0605 - Microbiology Marine cyanobacteria are the most abundant photosynthetic organisms in the world’s oceans, and occupy key positions at the base of marine food webs. This proposal aims to investigate how these photosynthetic bacteria acquire nutrients in the ocean, what they use these nutrients for, and how this lets them to adapt to different marine ecosystems. This will provide important information on what drives primary production in Australian oceans, which underpins our valuable commercial fisheries. Our research will provide a framework for development of biosensor capabilities for monitoring the health of Australian marine ecosystems.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2020 · 2020-01

Peril and promise: Origins and spread of integron gene cassettes. Integrons have a major role in spreading antibiotic resistance genes among pathogens. They do so by capturing gene cassettes encoding resistance, yet how these cassettes are generated, the taxa in which they originate, and the range of traits that cassettes can encode have been outstanding questions for 30 years. This project addresses these long standing questions. The project will analyze single bacterial cells to detect newly generated cassettes and assign them to specific taxa, using an innovative method that links cassette DNA to bacterial 16S rDNA. Understanding cassette origins is the key to controlling their activity, both to harness integrons for biotechnology, and to prevent pathogens from acquiring new, dangerous traits. Field of research: 0605 - Microbiology Antibiotic resistance poses a major crisis for medicine in the 21st Century, with significant economic, social and environmental costs. Bacterial DNA elements called integrons have had a major role in precipitating this crisis, by spreading resistance to important medical pathogens. Yet the origins and genesis of the resistance genes that they spread is still unknown. This project will help identify where, and how, the gene cassettes that integrons capture are generated. Understanding the dynamics of gene cassette genesis and transmission will help to develop strategies for controlling the spread of resistance, with significant outcomes for human and animal health. The ability of integrons to capture and express gene cassettes also holds great promise for biotechnology, and understanding how gene cassettes are generated is key to using integrons for industrial and agricultural applications. Integrons were discovered, and named, by Australian scientists, who also made many of the major advances in this research area. This project will maintain Australia's preeminence in this field.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2020 · 2020-01

Airborne Base Station Communication Systems: Capacity and Optimization. This project will fundamentally characterise and optimize information gathering, dissemination, and communication capacities of airborne base stations to enable low latency communications in rural and remote areas. New technologies such as precision farming, safe remote equipment operation in mining, and wide area surveillance and security, require low latency communications that are an order of magnitude beyond what is currently available from satellite links. The expected outcome will be radically new base station deployment and flight path planning, and data transmission technologies. These will unlock new application technologies by enabling secure wide-spread communications coverage, delivering economic benefits to remote Australia. Field of research: 1005 - Communications Technologies This project will enable widespread Airborne Base Station (ABS) communication coverage for applications including data gathering from remote environmental and agricultural sensors, and low latency communications for precision farming with driverless tractors and other machinery, supporting operations and safety. These are productivity game-changing technologies, particularly in rural and remote Australia where existing communications infrastructure is limited to long-delay satellite links. There are also many low latency ABS applications in mining, defense, bushfire response, and the industrial Internet of Things, as well as in covering black spots or short-term hot spots in mobile cellular radio networks. It is critical that new ABS technology be deployed optimally to cope with Australia’s harsh, and in many cases unique, conditions. There is massive potential, and clearly large economic productivity and safety benefits in enabling remote operations.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2020 · 2020-01

Assessing the economic and cultural value of Australian theatre. The aim of this project is to determine how the economic and cultural value of artistic and cultural enterprises is created, transmitted and received, with application to the live theatre. The project takes a novel theoretical approach to analysing these issues and develops new methods for empirical application. It expects to develop an innovative, multidisciplinary approach to analysing how theatre companies create value for their audiences, for theatre practitioners, for theatre as an artform, and for communities. The expected benefits include providing performing arts organisations and policymakers with new methods to demonstrate the full range of value yielded by the arts – enabling greater confidence in the allocation of funding. Field of research: 1605 - Policy and Administration Concerns about how to understand and measure the value generated by the creative arts in the economy and in society permeate policymaking in Australian governments and cultural institutions. This project will deliver significant economic benefit to the Australian community by enabling greater efficiency and transparency in the distribution of taxpayers’ money to the arts, in circumstances where governments, funding agencies, and managers of cultural organisations are under increasing pressure to demonstrate the benefits of such funding. The project will contribute to cultural policymaking processes at Federal, State/Territory and local levels of government, and the benefits will flow through to arts and cultural organisations, informing their financial planning and overall economic management. At a broader level, the project outcomes will contribute new ideas to ongoing discussions in the Australian community about our culture and the role of the arts in everyday life.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2020 · 2020-01

Support or sales? Medical device representatives in Australian hospitals. Medical device representatives provide crucial support to clinicians using complex medical equipment. However, their obligation to maximise sales conflicts with their support role. Increasing uptake of devices potentially impacts patient safety and healthcare costs, making it important to understand the involvement and influence of device representatives. The proposed research will investigate the ethical and legal impacts of device representatives in Australian hospitals, leading to new knowledge and innovative ethical and legal analyses of their activities. Benefits include a policy framework, new standards for managing device representatives’ interactions, and clarity about ethical and legal obligations of clinicians and institutions. Field of research: 2201 - Applied Ethics Widespread use of vaginal mesh products led to devastating harm for many women. Medical device representatives (MDRs) played a key role in promoting and supporting the use of mesh, often being present at operations without patients’ knowledge or consent. MDRs assist clinicians using medical devices, while also having commercial interests in increasing sales of these products. This conflicting role may compromise patient safety and inflate healthcare costs, raising questions about ethical practice and legal liability. By investigating the legal and ethical impacts of MDRs' hospital activities, the proposed research will lead to outcomes including a policy framework and industry standards for clinicians and institutions. These will contribute to commercial, economic and social benefits, supporting Australia’s world leadership in the medical device field and ongoing prosperity in this sector. For the Australian community the risks posed by current MDR activities will be better understood, contributing to safer healthcare, with potential healthcare cost savings through decreased sales of unnecessary products.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2020 · 2020-01

The sparrows in the mining towns: a century of adaptation to contamination. Our research will characterise how contamination from the extraction of precious metals can spread through the environment and how it effects a highly urbanised bird – the house sparrow. In many cases, populations of these birds have been intimately associated with mining operations for over a century, and our recent work has provided evidence of adaptation over time. House sparrows provide a great natural system to understand the genetic potential of organisms to adapt to anthropomorphic change in the environment connected with the resources industry. Our work, will bring new insight into the future management of environmental contamination, and the mitigation of adverse effects arising from resource extraction. Field of research: 0603 - Evolutionary Biology This research will enhance Australia’s ability to remain as a global leader in the management and mitigation of adverse effects arising from resource extraction. Sustainability of the minerals industry relies on an understanding of the impacts of operations on human and natural systems so that they can respond in a timely and effective manner. The research will lead to insights that will increase knowledge and understanding of the ability for natural systems to adapt to anthropogenic environmental change. Our previous work in this area has been well received by the local community, and has resulted in investments by government and industry to improve environment and human health outcomes (of over AUD$1 billion).

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2020 · 2020-01

Assessing the national productivity impacts of chronic ill health. The project aims to address one of the biggest gaps in health and productivity research by designing a novel composite national metric that will rank lost productivity due to chronic illness The project brings together tax/transfer modelling, health modelling and epidemiological modelling specialists to develop a highly innovative microsimulation model: Health&WorkMOD to then quantify the costs of health-related productivity loss. The proposed model, an international first, will be a powerful tool to comprehensively model the cost impacts of illness and simulate policy options related to health and productivity. This will provide answers to critical policy questions for government with potential significant economic benefits. Field of research: 1605 - Policy and Administration Although increasing productivity is identified by the Australian Government Treasury as a key agenda item, the impact of chronic illness and disability on productivity does not have the benefit of a comprehensive metric to guide government priority setting. There is no cohesive measure of the national productivity impacts of health, no way to rank the impact of health conditions on productivity and thus no mechanism for determining where investment in health might produce the greatest productivity gains. This project will fill a critical information void by (1) developing a novel comprehensive metric to rank chronic diseases by their productivity impacts, and (2) developing a new microsimulation model Health&WorkMOD to measure the cost of disease-related productivity loss incorporating the financial impacts to government and the economy including welfare, personal income taxation, and GDP, and impacts for individuals and families, including income, savings (including superannuation), income in retirement, and poverty.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2020 · 2020-01

Sculpting a masterpiece: synthesis and evolution of minimal yeast genomes. This project aims to better understand genome complexity by engineering minimal yeast genomes that have fewer genes, and are therefore easier to characterise and engineer. Yeast is a model organism and industrial food, fuel, and chemical producer. This project expects to increase our basic understanding of yeast genomes, and develop new tools for engineering whole genomes. Expected outcomes of this project include the engineering and characterisation of the world's first minimal yeast genome, and the development of novel industrial yeast strains. This will provide significant benefits for both fundamental genetics and biochemistry research, and the industrial use of yeast for bio-manufacturing of sustainable foods, fuels, and chemicals. Field of research: 0601 - Biochemistry and Cell Biology Yeast is both an industrial workhorse and a model organism for human biochemistry and genetics. This project will therefore deliver significant benefits for the Australian environment, economy, and society. By engineering improved and simplified industrial yeast strains, products that are currently derived from oil can be produced from sugarcane using yeast. This will have benefits for the environment through the mitigation of waste products and greenhouse gases from the petroleum industry, and benefit the economy through value-addition to Australia's rich agricultural resources such as sugarcane. Society will benefit from enhanced fundamental understanding of yeast biochemistry and genetics, which will contribute to the discovery of basic cellular processes that underly disease mechanisms.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2020 · 2020-01

Indigenous peoples’ experiences of cyberbullying: An assemblage approach. The proposed project aims to explore Indigenous peoples’ experiences of cyberbullying. Little is known about how Indigenous people understand, experience and respond to cyberbullying. This project expects to generate new knowledge on what has been described as a ‘national crisis’, with documented correlation with self-harm and suicide. Expected outcomes of this project include the development of detailed site-based ethnographies focusing on Indigenous students, parents, Elders and LGBTQI community members. This should provide significant benefits, including advancing academic scholarship and public understanding of cyberbullying, informing policy and program development, and generating Indigenous-specific educational resources. Field of research: 1699 - Other Studies In Human Society A recent nationally representative survey by the Australia Institute (2019) found that 39% of Australians have experienced some form of cyber-hatred and violence, and that it has cost the Australian economy an estimated $3.7billion. ReachOut Australia’s research has shown that up to 380,000 young people were cyberbullied in Australia in 2018. As a result, they describe cyberbullying as a significant public health concern. A recent major review of existing scholarly literature on cyberbullying found there was a significant gap in knowledge around Indigenous peoples’ experiences of online violence, both in Australia and globally (Carlson & Frazer 2018). The Australian Bureau of Statistics has shown suicide has increased twenty-one percent in Indigenous communities in the last decade and Indigenous youth rates are three times that of non-indigenous youth. A recent cluster of child suicides has revealed a correlation with cyberbullying and racism. Five Aboriginal girls, aged as young as 12, suicided in the first two weeks of 2019, in what has been widely described as a national crisis.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2020 · 2020-01

Plumbing the gap: a mantle solution to the enigma of bimodal arc volcanism. Subduction zones and volcanic arcs are the most tectonically active regions on Earth and are crucial to understanding, geochemical cycles, tectonic-climate coupling, ore genesis and natural hazards. Bimodal volcanism is a long-recognised characteristic of arc crust that has never been satisfactorily explained, yet, it controls many of these processes. This project will test a new hypothesis that the two types of magmas originate from distinct mantle sources. It integrates novel high-pressure experiments with database analysis of natural volcanic rocks, covering magmatic systems from mantle source to volcano. This project will improve our understanding of arc processes, including the association of economic metals with bimodal arc volcanism. Field of research: 0403 - Geology The novel experimental and geochemical data provided will significantly improve our understanding of geological processes in volcanic arcs. The improved knowledge of the spatial structure and composition of arcs will provide key inputs into modelling the occurrence of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and the occurrence of economic metal deposits. Results will benefit the refinement of predictive mineralisation models that aid exploration strategies, and improve the basis for hazards policy decisions. The project will thus support industry innovation and develop Australia's competitive advantage by enhancing the fundamental understanding of the physical state of the Australian crust, its resource endowment and recovery. Therefore, the research complements strategic initiatives such as "Uncover", "AuScope" and "Resources 2030 Taskforce" and addresses key goals of the Geosciences Decal Plan. Additionally, the project trains a new generation of scientists in experimental techniques in melt-rock reaction. This builds future capacity to maintain Australia's leading role in high-impact geoscience research.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2020 · 2020-01

Inflammation as an early form of maternal-fetal signalling in pregnancy. The project aims to understand the role of inflammatory signalling in marsupial pregnancy. This project is expected to explain why inflammation, a processes normally confined to injury and infection, is a part of reproduction in live-bearing mammals. Outcomes of this project include robust measures of the capacity for, impact of, and evolution of, inflammatory signalling in marsupial pregnancy. The project will provide new knowledge about the unique biology of Australia's marsupial fauna.This project will provide significant benefits, including enhanced capacity for reproduction research in Australia, new international collaborations between Melbourne and Yale, and a new explanation for the puzzling role of inflammation in pregnancy. Field of research: 0603 - Evolutionary Biology This project will test whether inflammatory signalling was co-opted to regulate key physiologies of reproduction and may have been the first mechanism for maternal-fetal communication in mammals. This is in the national interest because it will re-frame our understanding of mammalian implantation using unique Australian fauna. This knowledge will support new research that may be useful in supporting increasing implantation rate in both agricultural and medical settings and will provide critical data on marsupial reproduction to support the conservation efforts of Australia's threatened marsupial fauna. The research will increase Australia's strength in reproductive biology, by training new comparative reproductive biologists through Postdoctoral, PhD, and Master's programs, will develop new research capacity in the field of reproductive biology by developing new experimental models, will build a new international collaboration between the University of Melbourne and Yale University, and will demonstrate the importance of conserving Australian fauna to the public through scientific outreach.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2020 · 2020-01

Crises of Leadership in the Eastern Roman Empire (250-1000 CE). Armed conflict, the upheaval of social systems, and environmental crises cause citizens to question their leaders during periods of social change. They also increase religious extremism, including speculations about the imminent end of the world. The period 250-1000 CE reveals many examples of how such crises served leaders who knew how to profit from instability to expand their powers, and how they damaged the reputations of those who did not. Understanding how past leaders of the Roman world addressed these crises in practical and rhetorical ways may provide helpful and timely models of what works (and what does not) for contemporary community and political leaders, even in democratic political societies such as Australia. Field of research: 2103 - Historical Studies In 250 CE, after Roman defeat in the Persian wars, the Roman empire seemed on the brink of destruction. By 1000 CE it had collapsed, due to multiple crises including: waves mass migration, increasing demands for Roman citizenship, populism in government, religious extremism and food shortages due to war and climate change. These crises arose from complex problems that required strong and strategic leadership. There is a convergence between the challenges faced by Roman leaders then and those facing Australian leaders today. The project will have the following social and cultural benefits for Australian citizens: 1) provide new knowledge about the successful and not so successful practical strategies adopted by leaders in times of crisis; 2) highlight rhetorical discourses used by leaders and those they led to exaggerate or minimize threats; 3) promote intercultural understanding of religious reactions to historical crises that are relevant to the issues facing political and community leaders in democratic societies such as Australia.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2020 · 2020-01

When reading takes off: Children's word learning during independent reading. This project aims to address the major unsolved problem of how children build their knowledge about printed words through their reading. This is important since, once children have been taught the basics of reading, the primary means by which they learn new words is through reading experience. The project will use innovative technology to monitor children’s eye movements as they encounter new words during reading, examining factors influencing real-time cognitive processing and ongoing learning. Expected outcomes will be new insights into how to optimise children’s word learning when reading, and the refinement of a new computational model. These will inform policy and practice in reading instruction, to the benefit of Australia's children. Field of research: 1702 - Cognitive Sciences Becoming fluent and independent readers transforms children's lives. It opens up vast new opportunities for them to acquire knowledge and communicate, and maximises their potential to become productive, engaged members of society. However, many Australian children do not successfully make the transition to proficient reading, with up to 20% entering secondary school with low levels of literacy (OECD, 2016). This project seeks to identify ways to improve literacy outcomes in Australian children by discovering how to help them "take off" in reading and progress rapidly once they have acquired the basic skills they need to read on their own. It will provide insights into how to tailor children's instruction and the nature of their reading experiences so as to maximise learning at this key stage of literacy development. The outcomes will inform policy and practice in the teaching of reading, and guide the development of new interventions. In doing so, it will contribute to the national effort to reduce the social and economic cost of low literacy, with the ultimate beneficiaries being Australia's children.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2020 · 2020-01

The impact of micro gender biases on women's careers: the case of surgery. This project aims to investigate how small, cumulative gender biases affect women's career paths and progression in surgery, with implications for relevantly similar careers. Women surgeons show gendered patterns of subspecialty selection, experience a pay gap relative to men, and are less likely to be involved in innovation. The project will use philosophical theories of epistemic injustice and moral aggregation to provide new ways of understanding workplace gender discrimination, and qualitative methods to test their applicability in surgery. It will contribute new knowledge about invisible barriers to women’s career progression in surgery and similar careers, and make theoretical contributions to feminist epistemology and moral theory. Field of research: 2201 - Applied Ethics

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2020 · 2020-01

High resolution warm ocean records from laminated sediment. This project will produce environmental records during ocean warming events in the geologic past to reveal processes associated with warm oceans similar to those anticipated in the coming century. New Australian technology allows investigation of sediment records at unprecedented time resolution providing insight into processes operating on societally relevant time scales of decades to centuries. This work will open an archive of climate information revealing feedback, thresholds and tipping points from past events previously inaccessible because of technical and conceptual limitations. It will provide critical inputs into models predicting future climate and to illuminate the risks and compensating feedbacks occurring with warming. Field of research: 0403 - Geology Black shale sediments hold key records of Earth’s warm climate past, are the basis of the unconventional gas revolution providing lower greenhouse emissions than coal, and house some of Australia’s largest base metal deposits. Despite their economic and scientific significance they remain one of the most poorly understood geological deposits because they are comprised of nano to micrometer grains too small to study with current analytical tools. This work applies new Australian technology specifically designed to image the nanocomposite materials making up these deposits. It will be applied to key sediment records of past ocean warming events that are analogous to changes anticipated for the coming century. This work will identify the processes, feedbacks and rates of environmental change associated with the transition to a warmer climate providing critical inputs for computer models predicting future climate used by policy makers. It will reveal the rock properties and processes that form base metals and control hydrocarbon prospectivity that is important to resource exploration in the Australian economy.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2020 · 2020-01

Black America and the Korean War: Race, War, and Desegregation. This project aims to provide the first detailed analysis of African Americans in the Korean War. In so doing it will generate new knowledge on the Korean War, the African American military experience, the Black struggle for civil rights, and the complex relationship between race and US foreign policy. Along with a deeper understanding of a conflict that has been overshadowed in popular memory by World War 2 and the Vietnam War, but which remains a source of international tension, expected outcomes include a deeper understanding of the intersection between the African American military experience and US international power. These outcomes will be disseminated via a scholarly monograph, journal articles, and a popular, non-scholarly book. Field of research: 2103 - Historical Studies The security and economic well-being of the Australian community is influenced by actions of the United States, a close ally, in the Asia-Pacific, our region. Australia’s ability to negotiate nuanced foreign policy, balancing the shifting commercial and economic imperatives of the Asia-Pacific, with our long-standing alliance with the United States, will be strengthened by this project’s exploration of the Korean War, a conflict that has not officially ended. This conflict, which embodies many contemporary issues at the intersection of race, military power and foreign policy, remains a flashpoint in a region vital to Australia’s security and economic prosperity. As American international power is tested in myriad ways, and as racial issues assume renewed urgency across the globe, this project provides cultural benefits to Australians through its contribution to understandings of race, anti-racism and foreign policy in the Asia-Pacific. It is vital that these insights are brought to bear as Australian foreign policy evolves to address ever more complex dynamics in the pursuit of Australian economic stability.

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2019 · 2019-01

Two-price quantitative finance. This project aims to establish a novel field, namely two-price quantitative finance, and explore its applications. The new field will integrate two major schools for modelling and explain the presence of two prices, the buying and selling prices, widely observed in the real-world markets, and the equilibrium approach from the fundamental law of one price. The outcomes would deepen our understanding of the fundamental relationship among liquidity, prices, risk and the economy. This project expects to bring about long-term impact on quantitative finance and related applications through providing a deep understanding of, and a new perspective for, the design, risk and fairness of the finance, property and insurance markets. Field of research: 0102 - Applied Mathematics

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2019 · 2019-01

Beyond Speech: Towards better communication for children with hearing loss. Despite the benefits of early newborn hearing screening and early intervention programs for children with hearing loss, most still experience academic and social challenges at school. This is partly due to ongoing listening effort, leading to communicative breakdown. This project aims to identify the locus of the communicative challenges these children face during daily discourse interactions. The outcomes will identify which levels of language are most compromised and will inform future interventions to reduce children’s listening effort. This will be undertaken by bringing together researchers in basic science with hearing service providers, parents and industry, providing an innovative model for solving multidisciplinary challenges. Field of research: 1702 - Cognitive Sciences

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2019 · 2019-01

Tailoring multifunctional single site catalysts for carbon dioxide conversion. This project aims to develop multifunctional single site catalysts and collaborative surface sites to complete multi-step reactions using carbon dioxide (CO2) hydrogenation to higher alcohols with enhanced selectivity for large-chain alcohols. CO2 is an abundant and renewable carbon source for use as a feedstock, and closing the carbon cycle in an energy efficient manner has the potential for significant environmental benefits. The project is expected to advance the knowledge in rational design of new catalysts for CO2 conversion and understanding the catalyst structure-property induced reaction mechanism. This will result in an improved understanding of the reaction kinetics of utilising CO2 as a feedstock. Field of research: 0904 - Chemical Engineering

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2019 · 2019-01

Unveiling the Galaxy: Dense Gas and Star Formation in the Milky Way. This project aims to address one of the most fundamental problems in astrophysics - understanding how high-mass stars form - by utilising a new, innovative, purpose-designed astronomical survey. This project will generate new knowledge about the star formation process by interfacing theoretical predictions with novel observations, aided by the most accurate distances yet derived. Expected outcomes include a comprehensive understanding of star formation, and an unparalleled map of the dense gas structure of our Galaxy. This should provide significant benefits, such as the crucial insight needed to interpret future sensitive, high-resolution surveys with next generation, globe-spanning telescopes in which Australia is a key partner. Field of research: 0201 - Astronomical and Space Sciences

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2019 · 2019-01

In search of relevant things: A novel approach for image analysis. This project aims to investigate how experts’ cognitive processes may be transferred to computers for the automatic recognition of visual features. By merging computer and brain sciences, the project will characterise the way the brains of experts understand what is seen, in order to translate such a process in a new computer vision tool. This should provide significant benefits, such as automatic detection of threats or diseases in satellite and diagnostic imaging, respectively, among other applications. For the first time, the combination of how a computer analyses an image and how an expert interprets it will be used as a common language to enable machines to process visual information in a manner that mimics the way human brains do. Field of research: 0801 - Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2019 · 2019-01

Deep Interaction Learning in Unlabelled Big Data and Complex Systems. This project aims to effectively model intricate interactions deeply embedded in unlabelled big data and complex systems, which are often hierarchical, heterogeneous, contextual, dynamic or even contrastive. Learning such interactions is the keystone of robust data science and for realizing the value of big data but it poses significant challenges and knowledge gaps to existing data analytics and learning systems. The expected outcomes include new-generation theories and methods for the unsupervised learning of complex interactions in real-life big data, which are anticipated to enable the intrinsic processing of big data complexities and substantially enhance Australia’s leadership in frontier data science research and applications. Field of research: 0801 - Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2019 · 2019-01

Everyday autism: bridging the gap between lab and life. Recent research demonstrates that autistic people, their families and professionals often feel that there remains a sharp divide between autism science and key aspects of everyday autistic life, despite significant public investment in that science. This proposed research investigates reasons for this divide and proposes ways in which it might be overcome. Expected outcomes include greater opportunities for autistic people to play active roles in the research process and more scientific experimentation that moves out of the laboratory and into more true-to-life settings. Bridging the gap between lab and life will result in better theory-building on autism, better translation of scientific discoveries and more robust policy recommendations. Field of research: 1701 - Psychology

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2019 · 2019-01

Robust Quantum Control in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Era. This project aims to help companies and government flagships (including Australian) to achieve quantum supremacy- to build a computer based on quantum physics so complex that it outperforms all conventional computers. There is a race to do so because quantum computers will have a huge technological, scientific and economical impact. But currently the error rate of quantum computers is still too high. The devices are immensiley complex, but the models used to drive them are far too simplistic. This project will provide accurate and innovative models in this new era of quantum complexity, thus better controls, which will be tested on cloud-based quantum computers. The expected outcomes are robust quantum computers towards quantum supremacy. Field of research: 0206 - Quantum Physics

ARC National Competitive Grants · FY 2019 · 2019-01

The Mangatharra Road: a documentary-film history of first Australian trade. This project aims to change our understanding of Australian pre-colonial isolation by demonstrating Indigenous Australia's connection to South-East Asian cultural and trading networks. This project, re-enacting and documenting profound and centuries-old relationships between Indigenous Australia and Indonesia, will produce a series of films that will demonstrate this trading connection as a cultural route of World Heritage Status akin to other major trading routes such as the ‘Silk Road’. The project will record a collaborative, cross-cultural, documentary history of Australia’s very first international trading relationship, and produce insights into regional history with significant implications for understanding our present. Field of research: 1902 - Film, Television and Digital Media