Sharif Digital Repository

After three decades of research, the concept of emotion as an aspect of initelligence in artificial systems, is still unclear. Most of emotion models in AI are aimed to simulate the emotional states of human in differenct levels of abstraction and functionality. Therefore, the concept of emotions in artificial systems is completely dependent on human being’s emotional states and can not be used as a general tool for improving the intellingence of artificial systems. In this thesis, we have tried to show that defining emotion in a more abstract level can expand the domain of its appications in AI. According to some existing theories about emotions, we modeled emotions as local semi-soloutions... 

Recently, emotions have been widely used in systems that may face uncertainty or unknown situations. Various theories have been put forward for explaining emotions and their roles in mind. The model of emotional masks is a newly developed AI1 paradigm based on Minsky’s model of emotional mind in his recent book “The emotion machine”. This model takes a resource management approach toward modeling the mind and views different processes of mind as resources that need to be managed. The present work leads to the development of an intelligent controller (SCELIC2) that is based on ideas from emotional masks, Self-Organizing Controllers and network-based fuzzy systems. On the way to the... 

Systems Thinking is a key to improve the quality of decision making in various situations such as social, political, economic and managerial ones. Systems Thinking is considered a foundation of Organizational Learning and currently has a crucial and cultivating role in the management literature. Therefore, it is now critical for organizations to have people within them who are able to think systematically. This need for possessing Systems Thinkers in organizations highlights the importance of the education of Systems Thinking. An evidence for this is the growing importance of Systems Thinking Education in the Systems Thinking Literature. On the other hand, one of the most important issues in... 

Opportunities for creating value are shifting from managing tangible assets to managing knowledge based strategies that deploy on organizations' tangible assets: customer relationship, innovative products and services, high quality, and responsive operation processes, information technology and databases and employee capability skills and innovation" (Strategy Focused Organization, Norton, Kaplan; 1996). As organizations' value creating process shifts, learning has become one of the most important factors in value creation, and as a consequence dynamic capabilities creation. This research is concentrated on Electric Distribution Companies in Tehran region and studies knowledge management as... 

Developing algorithms in engineering and decision making systems based on psychological and biological mechanisms is a promising area of research. The challenging part of any psychological or biological system development is its learning necessity to adapt itself to random incidents, inherent in the environment. Goals, as defined in engineering problems, are the performance functions that continuously evaluate the responses of environment. They have a duty of directing the learning system to the desirable state. If the environment is corrupted by a variety of disturbances that cannot be predicted from the outset, adapting the parameter of learning agent is inevitable. In this work, we... 

Cloud Computing can be defined as a distributed set of virtual resources in order to be configured dynamically as an integrated system. One of the significant aspects of such systems is the method of task assignment which can affect the performance and efficiency of the whole system. The vast area of the size and complexity of the requests combined with the variable nature of the requested tasks, essence the use of the new smart strategies for the activity assignment. The main challenge of addressing non-functional requirements of the customers is in fact the software and/or hardware failures. The proposed failure-aware resource provisioning methods take into account failure probability... 

In this thesis, an approach is developed to obtain an optimal pricing policy for chartered flights. In order to do so, a model within the framework of dynamic programming is presented and its main structure is also analyzed. Since in real world cases the dimension of this model happens to be very large, a solution method is developed by “Q Learning” technique. This is an appropriate approach in approximate dynamic programming and reinforcement learning. Analysis is carried out under two different assumptions regarding demand, namely “linear-deterministic” and probabilistic demand for transition probabilities. An exact solution for deterministic demand case is developed. Furthermore, for... 

In computer vision literature, tracking problems are considered to be among the open and sophisticated issues. 3D object tracking is also an interesting problem which not only needs knowledge in computer vision, but it also requires knowledge of 3D geometry. Tracking soccer ball as a small and speedy obejct with PTZ cameras has several challenges such as blurring, blocking and getting lost. In this thesis, we aim to solve these issues with detection and learning frameworks. Current methods in tracking soccer balls usually exploit heuristic features, which as a result, creates dependency on the problem and its data type. Also, since ball tracking problem is directly related to the sports... 

In this article, asymmetric information is tested via a positive correlation test in the group supplemental health insurance (GSHI). Furthermore, using dynamic features of insurance contracts, moral hazard is separated from learning. For these two tests, Asia Insurance Company longitudinal data, for two types of paraclinical and hospital health services, during the period 2011-2016, is used. We find that the effect of asymmetric information is not significant in hospital services, as there is not any moral hazard in this group, we can conclude that there is also no between-group adverse selection in GSHI. On the other hand, in the group of paraclinical services, there is asymmetric... 

In this research, an emotion-based intelligent guidance planning for a flapping vehicle is proposed. It utilizes different sciences including artificial intelligence, neural, fuzzy and psychology accompanied by flight dynamics and modeling. The proposed system enables the robot to make emotion, learn and make decision based on its given personality. The decision making is related to the path planning and how moving from the current position to the designed one. In other words, the robot, at each moment, knows what to do and how to do. Therefore, guidance commands of the flying robot are as outputs of the system. In the present research, the control system is assumed ideal. The introduced... 

The accuracy, speed, and ability to do work in hazardous environments has led to the development of robots in everyday life. Accordingly, research on quadruped robots for use in military environments is expanding. Designing control algorithms for walking and stepping on quadruped robots is one of the most important parts of the design of these robots, which creates complex movements despite the lack of sophisticated equipment in the robots. One of the robot gaiting control methods is dynamic based method that is based on the robot’s dynamics and resistant to perturbations. Trajectory based method is another robot gaiting control method that is inspired from CPG algorithm and has learning... 

Automatic image annotation is an image retrieval mechanism to extract relative semantic tags from visual contents. The number of digital images uploaded in the virtual world is rapidly growing every day. Most of those images are not assigned with proper tags or labels. Although automatic image annotation methods are developed to assign proper tags to images, most of these methods assign some irrelevant tags and also sometimes a few relevant tags are missing. So far, the improvements of accuracy in newly developed automatic image annotation methods have been about one or two percent in F1-score compared to the previous methods. To reach much better performance, we analyzed most of the... 

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder for which there is no definitive cure and it is increasing every year for people with this disorder. In the last decade, the use of virtual environment to improve the skills of people on the autism spectrum has increased. In this research, a semi-intelligent algorithm was designed for a virtual reality game that could provide a more appropriate step to the user according to the user's responses. Our focus is on designing games to strengthen the child in terms of shared attention and eye contact. In other words, we seek to create a virtual environment with the ability to intelligently adapt to interact with our user and turn it into a suitable coaching...