BORG

BORG is a production AI platform built for the University of Akureyri. It resolves a tension that most institutions avoid: how to give staff and students full AI capability without sending sensitive academic data to external providers. The answer is hybrid sovereignty — commercial AI for general workloads, on-premise GPU for everything that must stay on campus.

The platform has been in production since 2025 and serves the university's research, teaching, and administrative needs. Beneath the surface, 42 production systems surface to users as seven integrated tools, from an AI chatbot with citation-backed RAG to a syllabus analyzer that checks compliance with Bologna Process standards.

Architecture

The platform is built on Next.js 16 with React 19 and PostgreSQL via Prisma 7, deployed across ten virtual machines on the university's internal network. Access requires VPN. Authentication uses Authentik SSO with university identities and role-based access control — staff, students, and administrators see different capabilities based on their institutional role.

• Commercial AI — OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google handle non-sensitive workloads where capability and speed matter most. The VoltAgent 2.x abstraction layer provides a unified interface with intelligent model selection: fast models for routine tasks, reasoning models for complex analysis.
• On-Premise GPU — 'Hercules', a dual-GPU workstation with RTX 5090 and RTX 4090 totalling 56GB VRAM, runs private language models via Ollama. Student records, research data, and institutional communications never leave campus.
• Infrastructure — Full production, staging, and development environments with nginx reverse proxy, internal DNS, separate database servers, and automated CI/CD via GitHub Actions.

Platform Tools

Seven tools serve distinct university needs. Each is built as an independent Cube — a modular extension that gets its own authentication, API routes, and configuration without modifying the core platform.

• AI Chatbot — Multi-provider RAG with inline citations. Supports document upload, conversation history, and intelligent routing between commercial and local models based on data sensitivity.
• Speech-to-Text — Icelandic and English transcription with custom pipelines. Icelandic language support requires dedicated infrastructure that commercial providers do not yet offer at production quality.
• Syllabus Analyzer — Analyzes course syllabi against Bologna Process learning outcome standards. Domain context creates more value than raw model capability — this tool demonstrates why university-specific AI matters.
• Media Transformer, Podcast Studio, Admin Dashboard — Audio/video conversion, browser-based podcast recording, and administrative oversight of platform usage and model costs.

Governance by Design

BORG is not just a technical platform — it is the university's AI governance infrastructure. The hybrid architecture enforces data sovereignty at the routing level: sensitive data physically cannot leave campus because the routing logic prevents it. This is governance through architecture, not policy documents.

The platform embodies the thesis argued in Beyond Fragmentation: that AI governance fails not from a lack of regulation but through structural mechanisms — Responsibility Fog and Cognitive Debt — that erode accountability and human judgment. BORG addresses both by making sovereignty architectural and keeping humans in control of what the AI can access.

Security and Method

BORG was built with AI under human direction: coding agents do the work through a documented control layer while a human stays in command. Every claim about the system is verifiable in version history. The platform's security was assessed across ten in-house audit waves: twelve critical findings were raised, and all twelve are resolved.