Sharif Digital Repository

The goal of crowd labeling is to find labels of given samples using humans’ mind power.Since crowds are not necessarily experts, their provided labels are rather noisy and erroneous.This challenge is usually resolved by collecting multiple labels for each sample and aggregating them to estimate its true label. Although this mechanism leads to high-quality labels, it is not actually cost effective. Adaptive methods consider that only some samples are challenging and require more labels. They spend the budget more wisely, and iteratively collect the required labels. Using adaptive methods approach, we utilize statistical latent models to model and analyze the collected labels and low-rank... 

A decade after discovery of graphene, the unique properties and characteristics of two-dimensional materials, particularly an emerging family of carbides and nitrides (MXenes), have attracted the attention of researchers. MXenes are two-dimensional structures of two or more layers of transition metals, with interstitial carbon and/or nitrogen atoms, with exceptional properties such as high specific surface area, excellent elastic modulus, metallic conductivity, and various termination groups. These properties can be altered by various factors, including chemical composition and synthesis processes, and any changes in these factors significantly affect the properties of MXene sheets. In this... 

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive debilitating neurological disorder that causes motor and cognitive impairment. Administration of dopaminergic medication (Levodopa) has been reported to be effective in attenuating the excessive pathological synchronization in basal ganglia. However, long term levodopa therapy has its pitfalls. High frequency deep brain stimulation (DBS) has been suggested as an effective alternative for reducing motor symptoms in PD. In this method, distinct brain regions involved in the pathophysiology of the disease are stimulated electrically at high frequencies (i.e. at 130 Hz). While several studies have been carried out on the effects of DBS and its clinical... 

In the current research, colloidal stability of two different types of coating on the surface of Superparamagnetic Iron Oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) was studied. In the first triumph, a dual-layer coating was achieved by utilizing optimum amount of Dextran and different PEG (Poly(ethylene glycol)) concentrations which the weight ratios of iron oxide/PEG were 1/1, 2/1, 4/1, 8/1, and 16/1. Then, the presence of the coating was characterized by XRD, FT-IR, DLS and FE-SEM methods. These results together with the TGA ones revealed that as the concentration of PEG surfactant increases, the thickness of coating increases. Moreover, VSM test was performed to specify the effect of coating on the... 

Improvement of semiconductors photocatalytic activity by different means has always been one of the challenges for researchers. Semiconductors doping for band-gap engineering and changing morphology to increase specific surface area and photocatalytic reaction sites are amongst these efforts. In this research simultaneous effect of these two parameters for three morphologies containing nanoparticle, nanowire and micro dandelion, simultaneously doped with carbon and nitrogen has been investigated. Final purpose of this thesis is to decrease the band-gap energy close to soft UV photon energies to make surface photodynamic therapy possible. Nanoparticle morphology with size distribution between... 

Over the past several years, TiO2 has become a focus of considerable researches as it possesses unique optical, catalytic and electrical properties in different applications such as sensors, water purification and dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC). The goal of this research was synthesis of 1-Dimentional TiO2 nanostructure with suitable properties for DSSC applications. Two different TiO2 powders including micron-size anatase and mesoporous powders (produced from reaction of TiC and HNO3) along with KOH or NaOH were employed in hydrothermal process. The process was performed in two different containers including autoclave and balloon-shaped flask. The products were characterized by X-Ray... 

Photodynamic therapy that has developed over last century, now has become more widely used medical tool for the treatment of various diseases such as cancer. This technique involves delivery of photosensitizing drugs, irradiation of light and motivation of drugs. The limitation of light penetration in body tissue, may resolve by application of upconversion nanoparticles. Upconverting nanoparticles could help treatment of cancer tumors in deep or critical points of body by converting high penetrating Near-Infrared emissions to higher energy visible emissions.In this research Er3+-Yb3+ Co-doped titanium dioxide upconversion nanoparticles prepared by Sol-gel method. The phase structure and... 

Today, the importance of scientific collaborations is due to the fact that researchers who jointly publish an article, research connections are formed between them, and as a result, professional learning is obtained. Each of these researchers brings a feature and advantage to the research team, such as mastering a particular topic and its subdivisions, team thinking, and division of labor between them. The importance of these collaborations is doubled when researchers collaborate with each other at the international level, because the networking of researchers through collaboration with colleagues from different countries, especially central and developed countries in science, in addition to... 

The goal of a speaker diarization system is to detect the number of speakers of a conversation and also assign each segment of the conversation to one of the speakers. In these types of systems it is assumed that the identity of the speakers is completely unknown. Usually speaker diarization systems operate in an offline mode. The system assumes that it does have the whole conversation at hand and then it starts processing the conversation. This method is effective for applications like spoken document retrieval, but it is not applicable to speech/speaker recognition systems which require online operating. In this dissertation, an online speaker diarization system is implemented. This... 

In this thesis, active guidance of a reentry vehicle using fuzzy logic is investigated. The guidance commands of the reentry vehicle (pitch and bank angles) are computed based on estimation of the final conditions, including range and cross-range errors and time-to-go. The final conditions are predicted utilizing a neural network. Inputs of this neural network are the current states of the vehicle and flight time. The first advantage of this approach is that no reference trajectory is required, which is mostly generated optimally for ideal conditions. Moreover, the methods based on keeping the nominal trajectory produce severe guidance commands for sudden disturbances (e.g. wind gusts),... 

The objective of the short-term scheduling of generation units has been changed with the restructuring of power systems. Minimizing the total operation cost while satisfying system operation constraints is the main objective of short-term scheduling of generation units in an integrated or centralized power system. Unlike the vertically integrated power systems, the main objective of Generation Company (GenCO) is maximizing the total profit in the restructured system. Two new approaches, called time varying acceleration coefficients iteration particle swarm optimization (TVAC-IPSO) and Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) are proposed to solve power systems static and dynamic economic... 

Single nucleotide polymorphs, There are changes caused by a mutation in a nucleotide in the Dena sequence. Mononucleotide polymorphisms are the most common type of genetic variation. Some of these changes have little or no effect on cells, while others cause significant changes in the expression of cell genes that can lead to disease or resistance to certain diseases. Because of the importance of these changes and their effect on cell function, the relationships between these changes are also important. Over the past decade, thousands of single disease-related mononucleotide polymorphisms have been identified in genome-related studies. Studies in this field have shown that the expression of... 

In the past few years, many research works on the controllable integration of metal nanoparticles and metal-organic frameworks were done, since the obtained composite material shows a synergism effect in catalysis and photocatalysis, drug delivery applications, gas, and energy storage, as well as sensing. For the first time, in this study, we employed template-assisted growth to synthesize Au-HKUST-1 Nanocomposite. XRD analysis entirely confirms that employing this strategy in synthesizing Au-HKUST-1 was wholly successful, and the plasmonic properties of this nanostructure were studied via UV-visible spectroscopy. In the course of synthesis, gold nanoparticles with 70nm diameter were... 

Nowadays many of us spend a big part of our daily times on social media.One of the most important research problems in social media analysis is how to engage users. The trace of user activity over these websites is a valuable resource for user understanding and engagement, but this data is very huge and unstructured. An approach to deal with this problem is user behavior modeling. In this process, first a behavioral model is considered for users, then using the activity data and the behavioral model, some parameters are learned. Finally, using the learned parameters, a user profile is constructed for each user. This profile can be used for user engagement and many other applications.... 

A great deal of information are continuously generated by users in different contexts such as social networks and online service providers in terms of temporal marked events. These events indicate that what happened to who by when and where.Modeling such events and predicting future ones has interesting applications in different domains such as item recommendation in online service providers and trending topic prediction in online social networks. However, complex longitudinal dependencies among such events makes the prediction task challenging. Moreover, nonstationarity of generative model of events and large size of events, makes the modeling and learning the models challenging.In this... 

The fast growth of social networks and their wide range of applications have made the anal-ysis of them an interesting field of research. The growth of concern in modeling large social networksand investigation of their structural features leads studies towards community detec-tion in such networks. In recent years, a great amount of effort has been done for introducing community detection algorithms, many of which are based on optimization of a global cri-terion which needs network’s topology. However, because of big size of most of the social networks , accessing their global information tends to be impossible. Hence, local commu-nity detection algorithms have been introduced. In this... 

Semi-supervised Learning (SSL) is an extremely useful approach in many applications where unlabeled data can be easily obtained. Graph based methods are among the most studied branches in SSL. Since neighborhood graph is a key component in these methods, we focus on methods of graph construction in this project. Graph construction methods based on Euclidean distance have the common problem of creating shortcut edges. Shortcut edges refer to the edges which connect two nearby points that are far apart on the manifold. Specifically, we show both in theory and practice that using geodesic distance for selecting and weighting edges results in more appropriate neighborhood graphs. We propose an... 

At first the killing vector fields will be investigated. Conditions are introduced for the hypersurface of a Riemannian manifold with a killing vector field to be equipped with the same killing vector field. Then 2-killing vector field is studied and its relation with killing vector fields and monotone vector fields is presented. After that conformal vector fields are discussed and conditions are introduced in order that the Riemannian manifold equipped with a conformal vector field, isisometric to n-dimensional sphere with constant curvature. Finally we will present the conditions which conformal vector field is a 2-killing vector field. Then we will present the results in which the... 

During the last decade, there have been a great number of researches on complex networks.Data aggregation is the first step in the analysis of these networks. However, due to the large scale of them, almost never is there complete information about a network’s different aspects. Therefore, analysis of a complex network is usually done based on the incomplete data. Al-though a good sampling approach in a way that the achieved sample is a good representative of the whole network has its own challenges, analysis of incomplete data causes a significant alternation in the estimation results. Consequently, one of the first problems emerging after sampling is the possibility of predicting the... 

Nowadays, video streaming over peer-to-peer networks has become an interesting field to deliver video in large scale networks. As multi-channel live video streaming networks increase,distributing video with high quality among channels faces many challenges. The most significant challenges cause from frequent channel churns, unbalanced channel resources, network heterogeneity and diversity of users’ bandwidths. They include: nodes’ unstability, low users participations, large startup and playback delays, low video quality received by users and lack of resources in unpopular channels.In order to solve the above problems, we have proposed several solutions such as: 1- using distribution groups...