Comma and.

Quick one today, folks. 

My husband is getting a PhD in electrical engineering, so I don't feel too bad picking on him in a grammar post. He knows stochastic processes, I know how to use commas. Which one is more useful? Anyways, I was editing one of the papers he's preparing to submit to a journal, and I found one comma error that he missed again and again. Maybe he was never taught it, or maybe he was taught it before he started caring about school. Either way, he doesn't know it.

In distributed ECFP, the information gathering scheme is explicitly defined via a preassigned (but arbitrary) communication graph and convergence results are demonstrated when interagent communication is restricted to local neighborhoods conformant to the graph.

Needless to say, I don't edit his papers for content. But despite only knowing what a handful of those words mean, I do know that two complete sentences joined by and also need a comma: "...graph, and convergence..." The only time a comma isn't necessary is when the two independent clauses are short and balanced.

The cat meowed and the dog barked.

But for that long technical sentence, a comma significantly aids in breaking up the thought into two distinct, though related, thoughts and making the sentence as a whole more digestible for the reader. It's one small change that goes a long way.