OPIE: AI guide to student placement success
Madgwick Beth O'Loughlin Madgwick Beth O'Loughlin

OPIE: AI guide to student placement success

When the Office for Professional Learning (OPL) team faced a common challenge - students struggling to find information on their placement portal - they turned to AI for a solution. The result was OPIE, a specialised AI assistant designed to help Teacher Education Students navigate the PREXUS MyLearn site more effectively.
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Strategic problem-solving with TV flair
Madgwick Beth O'Loughlin Madgwick Beth O'Loughlin

Strategic problem-solving with TV flair

What if you could channel the strategic brilliance of television's most formidable crisis manager for your everyday workplace challenges? That's the aim of The Fixer - a Madgwick assistant that brings the decisive, no-nonsense problem-solving approach of Olivia Pope, legendary 'fixer' of TV series Scandal.
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UNE's AI financial assistants streamline transaction coding
Beth O'Loughlin Beth O'Loughlin

UNE's AI financial assistants streamline transaction coding

Staff across UNE now have access to two powerful AI assistants that take the guesswork out of financial coding. Developed by Sharon Smith, Purchasing Officer in Financial Services, Business Intelligence (FSBI), these tools help staff quickly find the right codes for financial transactions - from requisitions and purchase orders to credit card acquittals.
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Video update experiment
Beth O'Loughlin Beth O'Loughlin

Video update experiment

When Dwayne Hurst, Manager Analytics, Insights and Reporting in Finance, Strategy and Business Intelligence, created a six-minute team update video in June, he had no idea it would prove a creative spark for departmental communications.
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New AI architecture challenges large models on complex reasoning
Stories Beth O'Loughlin Stories Beth O'Loughlin

New AI architecture challenges large models on complex reasoning

Research from a Singapore-based AI startup suggests that for complex reasoning, smarter design may be more effective than massive scale. A new research paper on the Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM), developed by Singapore-based Sapient Intelligence, shows strong performance on difficult logic problems along with significant improvements in efficiency over current approaches.
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Dashboard Detective BI navigation assistant  
Madgwick Beth O'Loughlin Madgwick Beth O'Loughlin

Dashboard Detective BI navigation assistant  

When you're managing dozens of Power BI reports with hundreds of pages, finding the right information becomes a significant challenge. Dwayne Hurst, Manager of Analytics Insights and Reporting, recognised this pain point and built a solution that could transform how staff navigate the university's extensive data resources.
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How to convert tables into LLM friendly format
Madgwick Beth O'Loughlin Madgwick Beth O'Loughlin

How to convert tables into LLM friendly format

While LLMs can parse tables in files like Word or PDF, for important information it is best practice to convert tables into a specifically LLM-friendly format called markdown. This ensures the structure is as clear and readable as possible for the AI, leading to more accurate results.
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Memory in Madgwick - A tale of two systems
Madgwick Beth O'Loughlin Madgwick Beth O'Loughlin

Memory in Madgwick - A tale of two systems

Madgwick uses two distinct systems to remember information: permanent Knowledge for foundational facts and evolving Memory for conversational context. Understanding how to use both is key to building more effective and reliable AI assistants. The most important rule is simple: if you want an assistant to always know something, add it to its Knowledge files.
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How to share your Madgwick assistants
Madgwick Beth O'Loughlin Madgwick Beth O'Loughlin

How to share your Madgwick assistants

Madgwick assistants are designed not just for individual use, but for collaboration. Sharing a well-crafted assistant allows your colleagues to benefit from your work, either by using the tool you have built or by cloning it to create their own version. This is a simple way to distribute effective workflows and share expertise across your team and the university.
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PASS assistant
Madgwick Beth O'Loughlin Madgwick Beth O'Loughlin

PASS assistant

A practical innovation from UNE's PASS team demonstrates how thoughtful change management can turn AI fear into adoption success. The project tackles a common challenge across the university: managing high-volume administrative queries while empowering users to embrace new technology.
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Build a Teaching Assistant via Word
Madgwick Beth O'Loughlin Madgwick Beth O'Loughlin

Build a Teaching Assistant via Word

Get started on creating your custom AI Teaching Assistant – without even leaving Word. This new approach offers an easy entry to an efficiency-enhancing assistant designed by UNE staff for our use.
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Unit Tasters deliver sustained student engagement through critical offer-to-census period
Project Belong Beth O'Loughlin Project Belong Beth O'Loughlin

Unit Tasters deliver sustained student engagement through critical offer-to-census period

UNE's Unit Taster pilot program has demonstrated strong student engagement and retention potential, with early results showing sustained usage patterns that extend well beyond the original "preview" concept. The pilot represents a strategic extension of Project Belong's proven success in improving student conversion rates, particularly among HEPPP-identified cohorts.
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