Statistical topic modeling is widely used in political science to study text. Researchers examine documents of varying lengths, from tweets to speeches. There is ongoing debate on how document length affects the interpretability of topic models. We investigate the effects of aggregating short documents into larger ones based on natural units that partition the corpus. In our study, we analyze one million tweets by U.S. state legislators from April 2016 to September 2020. We find that for documents aggregated at the account level, topics are more associated with individual states than when using individual tweets. This finding is replicated with Wikipedia pages aggregated by birth cities, showing how document definitions can impact topic modeling results.

Addressing strategies for managing vacant, abandoned, and deteriorated (VAD) properties is important for maintaining healthy communities. Yet, the process of identifying these properties can be difficult. Here, we create a human-in-the-loop machine learning (HITLML) model called VADecide and apply it to a parcel-level case study in Savannah, Georgia. The results show a higher prediction accuracy than was achieved when using a machine learning model without human input in the training. The HITLML approach also reveals differences between machine vs. human-generated results. Our findings contribute to knowledge about the advantages and challenges of HITLML in urban planning.

Underwater gliders are widely utilized for ocean sampling, surveillance, and other various oceanic applications. In the context of complex ocean environments, gliders may yield poor navigation performance due to strong ocean currents, thus requiring substantial human effort during the manual piloting process. To enhance navigation accuracy, we developed a real-time autonomous glider navigation software, named GENIoS Python, which generates waypoints based on flow predictions to assist human piloting. The software is designed to closely check glider status, provide customizable experiment settings, utilize lightweight computing resources, offer stably communicate with dockservers, robustly run for extended operation time, and quantitatively compare flow estimates, which add to its value as an autonomous tool for underwater glider navigation.

Intelligent physical systems as embodied cognitive systems must perform high-level reasoning while concurrently managing an underlying control architecture. The link between cognition and control must manage the problem of converting continuous values from the real world to symbolic representations (and back). To generate effective behaviors, reasoning must include a capacity to replan, acquire and update new information, detect and respond to anomalies, and perform various operations on system goals. But, these processes are not independent and need further exploration. This paper examines an agent's choices when multiple goal operations co-occur and interact, and it establishes a method of choosing between them. We demonstrate the benefits and discuss the trade offs involved with this and show positive results in a dynamic marine search task.

Jackson Schroeder is a recent graduate of Ohio University with a B.A. in Journalism from the E.W. Scripps School. He is originally from Savannah, Georgia. Jackson has covered a wide range of topics, including sustainability, technology, sports, culture, travel, and music. He plays bass and guitar, and enjoys playing and listening to live music in his free time.