This search does not affect the computational complexity, which is O(νnDE +SE) for agent n that computes DE parallel consensus steps and goes over a listofSE actionprofiles. Intuitively,wewouldneedE KN tofindtheoptimalactionprofile even with no noise, which creates delays where agents have to wait for their average reward to go abovetheirλn. In the multitasking robots game, if agent n has Ren = 0, then theoptimalactionprofilea e hastosatisfya e,m = nforallm. Ifλisasafemarginawayfromthe boundary of C(G), then most agents will have Ren = 0 most of the time. Hence, their performance depends on the best action profile in SE.

This thesis concerns the use of reinforcement learning to train neural networks to aid in the design of public transit networks. The Transit Network Design Problem (TNDP) is an optimization problem of considerable practical importance. Given a city with an existing road network and travel demands, the goal is to find a set of transit routes - each of which is a path through the graph - that collectively satisfy all demands, while minimizing a cost function that may depend both on passenger satisfaction and operating costs. The existing literature on this problem mainly considers metaheuristic optimization algorithms, such as genetic algorithms and ant-colony optimization. By contrast, we begin by taking a reinforcement learning approach, formulating the construction of a set of transit routes as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and training a neural net policy to act as the agent in this MDP. We then show that, beyond using this policy to plan a transit network directly, it can be combined with existing metaheuristic algorithms, both to initialize the solution and to suggest promising moves at each step of a search through solution space. We find that such hybrid algorithms, which use a neural policy trained via reinforcement learning as a core component within a classical metaheuristic framework, can plan transit networks that are superior to those planned by either the neural policy or the metaheuristic algorithm. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by using it to redesign the transit network for the city of Laval, Quebec, and show that in simulation, the resulting transit network provides better service at lower cost than the existing transit network.

I introduce a new large-scale dataset of historical wire articles from U.S. Southern newspapers, spanning 1960-1975 and covering multiple wire services: The Associated Press, United Press International, Newspaper Enterprise Association. Unlike prior work focusing on front-page content, this dataset captures articles across the entire newspaper, offering broader insight into mid-century Southern coverage. The dataset includes a version that has undergone an LLM-based text cleanup pipeline to reduce OCR noise, enhancing its suitability for quantitative text analysis. Additionally, duplicate versions of articles are retained to enable analysis of editorial differences in language and framing across newspapers. Each article is tagged by wire service, facilitating comparative studies of editorial patterns across agencies. This resource opens new avenues for research in computational social science, digital humanities, and historical linguistics, providing a detailed perspective on how Southern newspapers relayed national and international news during a transformative period in American history. The dataset will be made available upon publication or request for research purposes.

Transit agencies world-wide face tightening budgets. To maintain quality of service while cutting costs, efficient transit network design is essential. But planning a network of public transit routes is a challenging optimization problem. The most successful approaches to date use metaheuristic algorithms to search through the space of possible transit networks by applying low-level heuristics that randomly alter routes in a network. The design of these low-level heuristics has a major impact on the quality of the result. In this paper we use deep reinforcement learning with graph neural nets to learn low-level heuristics for an evolutionary algorithm, instead of designing them manually. These learned heuristics improve the algorithm's results on benchmark synthetic cities with 70 nodes or more, and obtain state-of-the-art results when optimizing operating costs. They also improve upon a simulation of the real transit network in the city of Laval, Canada, by as much as 54% and 18% on two key metrics, and offer cost savings of up to 12% over the city's existing transit network.

Planning a public transit network is a challenging optimization problem, but essential in order to realize the benefits of autonomous buses. We propose a novel algorithm for planning networks of routes for autonomous buses. We first train a graph neural net model as a policy for constructing route networks, and then use the policy as one of several mutation operators in a evolutionary algorithm. We evaluate this algorithm on a standard set of benchmarks for transit network design, and find that it outperforms the learned policy alone by up to 20% and a plain evolutionary algorithm approach by up to 53% on realistic benchmark instances.

Neural Magic, the AI company building a software platform for deep learning inference, announced a $30 million Series A funding round led by existing investor NEA with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Amdocs, Comcast Ventures, Pillar VC, and Ridgeline Ventures. This financing brings the company's total amount raised to $50 million. The new capital will be used to advance Neural Magic's leadership in pure software machine learning acceleration and to support the success of a growing community of developers. Born out of MIT, Neural Magic creates groundbreaking algorithms and tools that bring software, rather than specialized hardware, to the center stage in machine learning (ML) infrastructure. The company creates machine learning models that deliver GPU class performance on commodity CPU hardware, creating a flexible world of AI delivered and executed purely in software.

As more video providers finding audiences directly through apps and the web -- and away from pay-TV-based packages -- we're seeing the emergence of more analytics to measure how those videos are delivered, and who is watching them. Conviva, a company that has developed a set machine-learning-based algorithms to do just that, today announced that it has raised $40 million from strategic, new and existing investors to continue building out its platform and business. Investors include Australia's sovereign wealth fund Future Fund, NEA, Foundation Capital, and Time Warner Investments. The company is not disclosing its valuation, but a source close to the company confirms that it is around $300 million. Conviva has raised $121 million to date. If you've had your eye on the streaming video industry for a while, you'll know that Conviva is not exactly a spring chicken.