This study provides a systematic review of the recent advances in designing the intelligent tutoring robot (ITR) and summarizes the status quo of applying artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. We first analyze the environment of the ITR and propose a relationship model for describing interactions of ITR with the students, the social milieu, and the curriculum. Then, we transform the relationship model into the perception-planning-action model to explore what AI techniques are suitable to be applied in the ITR. This article provides insights on promoting a human-robot teaching-learning process and AI-assisted educational techniques, which illustrates the design guidelines and future research perspectives in intelligent tutoring robots.

Educational attainment measured by years of education has been widely reported as leading to higher levels of political participation. The theory is that education plays an important role in a person’s civic skills and cognitive capacity that helps them understand and connect with the world of politics and be able to defend their interests (Nie et al. 1996). However, a number of studies argue that education has no effect on political engagement as educational attainment has been identified as a proxy for socioeconomic background and cognitive ability. In order to examine whether the university has an effect on young people’s intentions for active citizenship in England, hybrid cumulative logit models are used in the Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study (CELS) 2009–2014 with between and within effects which help explain differences between individuals and within individuals at different time points. Control measures of previous citizenship education are also included in the analysis. We find that the university has a positive independent effect on intentions to vote, a negative effect on intentions to volunteer, but not on intentions to protest in the future for young people in England. These findings help clarify the role of higher education (HE) in developing and maintaining democracy and social cohesion.

The role of universities in preparing students to be active citizens within civil society has gained increasing attention. However, only limited research has been conducted on students’ views of universities as sites to learn representative democracy. To address the research gap, this article conducts eight semi-structured interviews with staff, student leaders and students without any positions in a case university. The students are undergraduate and post-graduate from different academic majors. Community of practice theory is employed to help understand students’ views of their experiences of representative democracy at the university. After analysing the interview data, the article finds that student leaders regard their role as mainly representing students and that all students in the study realise the importance of such democratic representation through participation. Importantly, through participation in representative democracy, students, especially student leaders, gain knowledge and skills on voting and elections. Interestingly, students’ sense of belonging is a result of participation in student union, society and club activities, which very likely includes voting and engagement with elections. Learning and belongingness are likely to make students participate more in future democratic representation activities. Although students give credit to the university’s role in promoting representative democracy, there are challenges. Specifically, the university is supposed to promote more participation in voting and elections for first-year students, and there is also concern that the short-term nature of positions in the student union may not allow real changes to be made. The findings shed some light on how students learn representative democracy in universities in neoliberal countries.

Universities can be understood as a key site for the transmission of democratic values by helping young people participate directly in democratic activities and education. Thus, it is important to understand whether and how citizenship learning takes place at universities in the UK. This article uses citizenship in transition (CiT) data to examine the possible ways in which university experiences influence student citizenship from a constructivist learning perspective. Based on Habermas’ theories of communicative action and communities of practice, the article proposes that the experience of participating in activities and organisations and the self-identity that is gained by reaching understanding, coordinating interaction, and effecting socialisation at universities are able to promote citizenship learning in the UK. Building on a quantitative analysis, this article shows that students’ sense of belonging to their universities and their participation in organisations generally lead to more civic behaviour in the future.

The relay function of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is playing an increasingly important role in wireless communication systems, as UAVs often perform tasks at high altitudes and can avoid the impact of ground obstructions on the communication links between ground communication devices, thereby enhancing the reliability and communication capacity of the links. Meanwhile, UAVs have more degrees of freedom and can achieve optimal position deployment and robust anti-jamming performance through flexible adjustment of spatial position. However, the premise for UAVs to achieve the above advantages is accurate modeling and analysis of the wireless communication channel, as well as the deployment of reasonable joint geographic-electromagnetic domain optimization (JGEDO) algorithms to fully utilize their own degrees of freedom. Due to the increasing threat posed by the current electronic warfare environment to the normal communication of UAVs, this article focuses on environments with malicious jamming and geographic obstacles, and constructs a communication system composed of a base station (BS), a relay UAV, and several remote ground robots (RGRs). On the basis of considering multipath fading and estimation error of jammer position, the expected value of instantaneous average signal-to-interference-ratio (SIR) for the entire system is derived. Taking this indicator as the optimization objective, this article develops a joint optimization algorithm for the position of the UAV and the mainlobe width of UAV antenna beams. Numerical simulation verifies the effectiveness of this algorithm compared to traditional algorithms.