Simtheory Academy launch: AI skills for all
Through UNE's official training partnership with the Simtheory platform - which provides the underlying technology for Madgwick - the Academy addresses an important institutional responsibility: helping the university community harness AI tools effectively while understanding their limitations and risks. Open to the public, Simtheory Academy offers AI education to a wide audience - from UNE colleagues and prospective students to community members seeking to build practical skills and use AI tools safely.
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UNE leads on Indigenous rights in AI
As artificial intelligence reshapes university education, the University of New England is addressing an important question: how can institutions ensure AI development respects Indigenous rights rather than perpetuating existing patterns of knowledge extraction?
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PASS leaders to guide peers’ AI adoption
A strategic partnership between LabNext70 and Peer Assisted Study Sessions (PASS@UNE) is helping UNE students access peer-led support to build confidence in adopting AI tools like Madgwick Student. Through mentor-led workshops and one-on-one training sessions, PASS@UNE is playing a pivotal role in the Madgwick Student rollout - leveraging its established student-to-student network to foster safe and effective AI adoption across the student body.
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Madgwick AI cafe
Madgwick help, no fuss. Wednesdays from 9 - 10am.
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Madgwick Student: Safety, privacy, equity and job readiness at scale
When 85-90% of university students are already using AI tools,1 providing secure, equitable access becomes an institutional responsibility. Madgwick Student, launching November 1, addresses this need through a custom platform that prioritises student protection while building essential workforce skills.
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Visualising spreadsheet data
Converting spreadsheet data into professional charts shouldn't require hours of Excel wrangling. The Data Visualisation Assistant, conceived by Digital Marketing Coordinator Robert Hughes and developed by LabNext70's Prompt Engineer Tom Miles, bridges this gap - transforming raw data into shareable visualisations through a guided four-step process.
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Manage your workload with Task Planner MCP
Bring seamless task management directly into your AI conversations on Madgwick with the Task Planner MCP. Rather than switching between tabs or losing track of action items buried in chat history, you can create, organise, and update tasks a central project hub - without ever leaving your conversation.
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Create AI podcasts with Madgwick
Transform your Madgwick chats and research into professional-sounding podcasts in minutes using the new Podcast Maker MCP tool. You can quickly generate a podcast from your chats to create an engaging audio summary for students, or audio content you can consume on the go.
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Build AI learning experiences with Cogniti Assist
UNE educators can now transform teaching ideas into functional AI learning tools without any technical expertise. The new Cogniti Assist tool guides you through creating custom AI agents for student learning - no coding or AI experience required.
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Transform images with Nano Banana
Madgwick’s new Nano Banana (aka Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) MCP brings powerful new image editing capabilities to your fingertips. Unlike traditional AI image generators, Nano Banana excels at editing and combining existing images, rather than creating new ones from scratch.
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Madgwick update: MCPs connect AI to tools
The MCP Store serves as your central hub for discovering and installing these capabilities. Currently in trial phase, the store is being populated gradually to ensure stability and proper testing.
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What model fits best? Try the Model Catalogue
The new Model Catalogue in Madgwick takes the guesswork out of selecting AI models by showing which models excel at specific tasks, their technical capabilities, and compatibility with MCPs.
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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
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
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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How AI 'remembers' your chat - it doesn't
Understanding how AI processes your conversations reveals why your data stays secure and helps you make informed platform choices.
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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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Remove response: Pruning chats helps outputs
The remove response feature in Madgwick helps you maintain cleaner, more focused conversations by deleting unwanted AI responses while preserving your original input for editing.
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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
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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