The lab that built it.
LabNext70 is the applied AI lab at the University of New England – Australia's first purpose-built AI research and delivery hub focused on education. It builds and tests AI-supported tools, learning models and institutional AI capability in a working university: real students, real academics, real governance.
custom AI assistants built by staff and students inside the lab's governed environment.
messages in a rolling 30-day period across the lab's platforms.
Australian university deployment of secure enterprise AI access to every student.
A shift this consequential had to be led by educators.
LabNext70 was founded by UNE Vice-Chancellor Professor Chris Moran and Aaron Driver with a specific mandate: build the learning model the AI era requires, inside a university that can govern it properly – accountable to pedagogy, academic standards and the public interest.
The lab's philosophy is "humanised technology" – AI that enhances, empowers and elevates the people who use it. It starts from pedagogy, institutional purpose and human capability.
Madgwick takes its name from Sir Robert Madgwick, UNE's founding Vice-Chancellor and a pioneer of higher education access, who believed geography, work, family and circumstance should not decide who gets a university education. The platform carries his premise into the AI era: the arrival of AI should not decide whether education still builds real capability, or who can afford to keep up.
Aaron Driver
Associate Professor Aaron Driver is Chief AI Officer at the University of New England (Australia), Founder of LabNext70, and Co-Director and Co-Founder of the Institute for Strategic AI. He is the architect of Earned Learning, the pedagogy at the heart of Madgwick – an AI-native learning environment built and shipped inside a working university, where assurance of learning is part of the architecture rather than an afterthought.
Journalist, political staffer, eBay, academic in France, agency founder – with published research on narrative persuasion and behaviour change. He is not a technologist guessing at education, or an educator guessing at technology. He has spent a career in both.
"AI access is no longer impressive. Capability is."
Access, then capability, then infrastructure.
Madgwick Staff and Madgwick Student solved governed, equitable access to AI across the University of New England.
Access alone changes nothing about learning. Madgwick and the Earned Learning pedagogy turn it into verified capability.
The Institute for Strategic AI turns AI into research infrastructure – accelerating discovery and real-world outcomes.
This team does not publish think pieces.
It ships working systems, at scale, under governance.
Madgwick Staff & Student
The governed AI platform for the whole university: secure, equitable access to advanced AI on sovereign infrastructure – every staff member and all 22,000 students, the first deployment of its kind by an Australian university. Not to help people avoid thinking. To help them think better.
Learn more →Annota
UNE's AI-powered writing feedback platform, built in-house: fast, formative feedback anchored to the student's own draft, grounded in UNE's academic standards and delivered inside MyLearn – with every submission processed on sovereign infrastructure in Australia.
Learn more →Institute for Strategic AI
Predictive, generative and agentic AI for autonomous research – discovery loops linked to a $2.7 million ARC-funded robotic laboratory, cutting experimental cycle times from years to months. Directed by Professor Amir Karton, co-directed by Aaron Driver.
Learn more →The HEDx AI Agent
Shared sector intelligence built for the HEDx community: five years of HEDx content, verbatim retrieval, layered search, growing daily – a working demonstration of the lab's grounded-retrieval capability.
Learn more →Indigenous Voice Assistant
Built on Madgwick by the Oorala Aboriginal Centre: a guided, rights-based assistant that helps educators bring Indigenous perspectives into curriculum – reflection first, answers second.
Learn more →NSW Rugby League analytics
A performance analytics platform for the NSW Blues' coaching staff, built on Madgwick: GPS body-load data merged with live game statistics at the timestamp level – showing not just what a player did, but how hard they worked to do it.