Python regex match human names with abbr (dots) in text
If you are ok with the following assertions:  

Names and surnames always begin with a capital letter
For names reduced to one capital letter, this letter is always immediately followed by a dot
Names can be separated with either a comma or the "and" word
These names end with a final dot

Then you can use this regex: ^©[0-9]{4} +(([A-Z][a-z]+|[A-Z]\.|and|,) *)*\. *
I want to use regex to match patterns in paragraphs like the following:

©2016 Rina Foygel Barber and Emil Y. Sidky. Many optimization problems arising in high-dimensional statistics decompose naturally into a sum of several terms, where the individual terms are relatively simple but the composite objective function can only be optimized with iterative algorithms. In this paper, we are interested in optimization problems of the form F(Kx) + G(x), where K is a fixed linear transformation, while F and G are functions that may be nonconvex and/or nondifferentiable. In particular, if either of the terms are nonconvex, existing alternating minimization techniques may fail to converge; other types of existing approaches may instead be unable to handle nondifferentiability. We propose the mocca (mirrored convex/concave) algorithm, a primal/dual optimization approach that takes a local convex approximation to each term at every iteration. Inspired by optimization problems arising in computed tomography (CT) imaging, this algorithm can handle a range of nonconvex composite optimization problems, and offers theoretical guarantees for convergence when the overall problem is approximately convex (that is, any concavity in one term is balanced out by convexity in the other term). Empirical results show fast convergence for several structured signal recovery problems.

So that the first line with human names, year, and copyright (©2016 Rina Foygel Barber and Emil Y. Sidky.) can be removed.
The only I can come up now was to use ^© ?[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].+\.. However, this can hardly match things like the above paragraph due to the . in human names. Any suggestions? Thanks!