Sharif Digital Repository

Nowadays, fossil fuels are well known as a predominant source of energy in the planet. Located in the Middle East region, Iran holds one of the largest fossil fuel reservoirs in the world. The country has abundant oil and natural gas fields in various regions; some of them are shared between other countries and have not reached their operational capacity yet. Meanwhile, during recent years and due to global warming followed by environmental global contracts such as Kyoto protocol, using fossil fuels is being criticized to a large extent around the world. Therefore, the global interest has been focused toward clean energy resources. Furthermore, endowed with sundry geographical pattern... 

In the post-recession period, the business environment in developing countries is still relatively undesirable. Based on the reports published, the number of closed entrepreneurs are significantly more than the number of those newly established. These statistics also reflect that the development of entrepreneurship faces several challenges. However, a strategic management program must be accurately conducted to effectively control entrepreneurial challenges based on the limitation of time and financial resources. On the other hand, the program should provide an appropriate opportunity for competitiveness by producing better quality goods and services successfully marketed to consumers. The... 

With the advent of new technologies and globalization of business, supply chains have turned into indispensable tools for gaining competitive advantage. The application of new technologies like blockchain can benefit sustainable energy supply chains by improving chain and logistics operations in the areas of trust, transparency and accountability, cooperation, information sharing, financial exchanges, and supply chain integration. However, the efforts to adopt such technologies in supply chains tend to face many challenges and challenges, which can seriously threaten their success. Therefore, it is crucial to carefully examine the challenges to blockchain technology application. This... 

One of the most primary phases of automatic text processing is spelling error detection and grapheme normalization. Storing textual documents faces several problems without passing this phase, which causes a disturbance in retrieving the documents automatically. Therefore, specialists in the fields of natural language processing and computational linguistics usually make an attempt to sample various data through presenting ideal methods and algorithms in order to reach the normalized data. Several researches have been conducted on English and some other languages, which have been followed by a certain amount of researches on Farsi too. Sometimes, these several researches have remained to be... 

Over many decades, the electric power industry has evolved from a single low-power generator serving a small area to highly interconnected networks serving a large number of countries, or even continents. Nowadays, an electric power system is one of the largest man-made systems ever created, consisting of an enormous number of components ranging from small electric appliances to very large turbo-generators. Running such a large system is a significant challenge. It has necessitated the resolution of numerous issues by educational and industrial institutions. The main issues of the power system can be categorized into planning, operation, and control issues which are analyzed in this chapter,... 

Decentralized integral controllability (DIC) is an important property of industrial and process multivariable control systems. In this paper, some of the previously proposed conditions for the study of the DIC of certain systems are extended to treat systems with correlated and independent uncertainty. These conditions are based on the concept of the stability of Polytopic and Interval family of matrices, and evaluation of the Lyapunov condition only at special vertices of these families. By comparison with previous sufficient conditions, and known necessary conditions, it is demonstrated that the newly proposed criteria are significantly less conservative, especially in the case of... 

Recently, a new data collection was initiated within the RedDots project in order to evaluate text-dependent and text-prompted speaker recognition technology on data from a wider speaker population and with more realistic noise, channel and phonetic variability. This paper analyses our systems built for RedDots challenge-the effort to collect and compare the initial results on this new evaluation data set obtained at different sites. We use our recently introduced HMM based i-vector approach, where, instead of the traditional GMM, a set of phone specific HMMs is used to collect the sufficient statistics for i-vector extraction. Our systems are trained in a completely phraseindependent way on... 

Many research and development projects are being performed worldwide to develop new products and applications for computer-assisted and medical robotic systems. In this paper, an overview of selected state-of-the-art applications of robotic technology in medicine is presented. Four key areas of image-guided surgery, virtual reality in medicine, surgical robots, and robotic rehabilitation systems, are studied. As well, current challenges in research and development are discussed. Copyright  

Visual tracking has attracted a significant attention in the last few decades. The recent surge in the number of publications on tracking-related problems have made it almost impossible to follow the developments in the field. One of the reasons is that there is a lack of commonly accepted annotated data-sets and standardized evaluation protocols that would allow objective comparison of different tracking methods. To address this issue, the Visual Object Tracking (VOT) workshop was organized in conjunction with ICCV2013. Researchers from academia as well as industry were invited to participate in the first VOT2013 challenge which aimed at single-object visual trackers that do not apply... 

An important security challenge in database outsourcing scenarios is the correctness verification of query results. The proposed approaches in the literature, impose high overhead on both the service provider and specially the clients. In this paper, we propose the Trust-Based Fake Tuples approach to audit the correctness of query results. In this approach, some fake tuples are included among the real ones in order to verify the correctness of the results. The experience learnt from past results is used in this paper to evaluate the trust toward the service provider. This trust value is used to tune the number of fake tuples and subsequently the imposed overhead. As the trust value toward... 

In this paper, the task is to determine whether an HTTP session buys an item, or not, and if so, which items will be purchased. An HTTP session is a series of item clicks. A session has type buy, if it buys at least one item, or non-buy otherwise. Accordingly, data is in (session, item, time) format, which tells us when an item is clicked or purchased during an HTTP session. The main challenge comes from the fact that (1) user information is not available for clicked or purchased items, which are merely tagged with anony-mous sessions, and (2) suggestions are highly temporal as they are suggested to sessions instead of users. In other words, users which are stable and identified are replaced... 

LBlock is a lightweight block cipher proposed in ACNS 2011 as a solution to the security challenge in extremely constrained environments. Because biclique cryptanalysis had not been invented when this cipher was designed, the designers themselves evaluated the security of this cipher one year later in WISA 2012, where a modified key schedule was also suggested to make this cipher resistant against biclique attack. In this paper, we analyze the full-round of LBlock with this modified key schedule by the biclique attack with data complexity of 212 and computational complexity of 278-74. In the biclique attack, a shorter biclique potentially results in less data complexity, but at the expense... 

Renewable energies as a solution for environmental issues have always been a key research area due to Demand Response Programs (DRPs). However, the intermittent nature of such energies may cause economic and technological challenges for Independent System Operators (ISOs) besides DRPs, since the acceptable effective solution may exceed the requirement of further investigations. Although, previous studies emphasized employing Demand Response and Renewable Energies in power systems, each problem was investigated independently, and there have been few studies which have investigated these problems simultaneously. In these recent studies, authors neither analyzed these problems simultaneously... 

Cloud Manufacturing (CM) as a successful manufacturing business model and a major driver of Industry 4.0 has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. CM idea aims to streamline the on-demand provisioning of manufacturing resources and capabilities as services, providing end-users with flexible and scalable services accessible through global networks. This idea created many opportunities and challenges. One of the critical challenges is resource allocation, which determines who interacts with whom and how in the CM platform. The type of the platform is a determining factor for the selection of the appropriate resource allocation. To analyze the impact of the allocation on the utilities,...