Sharif Digital Repository

In today's world, people, organizations and countries which have managed to foster successful entrepreneurs and utilize technical science and technology are growing wealthier and more prosperous rather steadily. Entrepreneurs establish new organizations independently while intrapreneurs create new structures within an existing organization. In Iran, huge organizations, which play the most important roles in the country'seconomy, are often run by the government. The main purpose of this research is to study of some prinicipal obstacles hindering intrapreneurial activities in Iran's big organizations. For this purpose, Raja Passenger Trains Company (Raja: I.R.I. Railways) is chosen and... 

Although it is widely accepted that entrepreneurial orientation (EO) improves firm performance, scholars have advised that particular attention should be paid to the context. In this research, we investigate a less explored context of franchising where business systems and procedures are usually dictated to franchisees by franchisors. Therefore, whether a franchisor should allow franchisees to pursue EO (innovativeness, proactiveness, risk-taking, competitive aggressiveness, and autonomy) is not clear. In the context of franchising, the majority of prior studies have mainly focused on the employment of EO as a unidimensional construct and at the franchisor level. In this research, we take a... 

Let G be a graph and F: V(G) → 2N be a mapping. The graph G is said to be F- avoiding if there exists an orientation O of G such that do +(v)∉ F (v) for every v ∈ V (G), where do +(v) denotes the out-degree of v in the directed graph G with respect to O. In this paper it is shown that if G is bipartite and |F (v)| ≤ dG (v)/2 for every v ∈ V (G), then G is F-avoiding. The bound |F (v)| ≤ dG (v)/2 is best possible. For every graph G, we conjecture that if |F (v)| ≤ 1/2 dG (v)-1) for every v ∈ V (G), then G is F-avoiding. We also argue about this conjecture for the best possibility of the conditions and also show some partial solutions. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc  

The prediction of material microstructure is of great interest to the material designers since the property and performance of materials depend strongly on their microstructures. In this work, a Monte Carlo approach is used to investigate the normal grain growth of aluminum and pure copper. The grain growth was calculated at certain temperatures using the grain growth law and compared with the simulation results by varying the Q as a parameter of simulation lattice orientation for pure aluminum. Also the results predicted by the Monte Carlo method showed a good agreement with the experimental results of grain growth of pure cooper. It was found that increase in Q increases the accuracy of... 

A proper orientation of a graph G=(V,E) is an orientation D of E(G) such that for every two adjacent vertices v and u, dD -(v) ≠ dD -(u) where dD -(v) is the number of edges with head v in D. The proper orientation number of G is defined as χ→(G)=minD∈Γmaxv∈V(G)d D -(v) where Γ is the set of proper orientations of G. We have χ(G)-1≤χ→(G)≤Δ(G), where χ(G) and Δ(G) denote the chromatic number and the maximum degree of G, respectively. We show that, it is NP-complete to decide whether χ→(G)=2, for a given planar graph G. Also, we prove that there is a polynomial time algorithm for determining the proper orientation number of 3-regular graphs. In sharp contrast, we will prove that this problem... 

Agent-oriented software products are becoming increasingly complicated, and the competitive market is forcing the producers to reduce time-to-market and increase the quality of the software produced. Therefore, developers have come to realize the need for more reliable and efficient agent-oriented software development processes (methodologies) which address the specific needs of each and every project. Software Process Lines provide a solution to this problem by using Process Line Engineering concepts for instantiating bespoke software processes. This research focuses on developing a software process line for Requirements Engineering (RE) in the context of agent-oriented software... 

Learning a foreign language encompasses a process of trial and error that can lead to the progression of the learner's interlanguage, meaning that the learners make use of their language knowledge that receives feedback and brings about progress through diagnosis of the problems and being corrected by the teacher. Therefore, there exists a need to analyze the underlying reasons causing the students to remain taciturn with a low willingness to communicate (WTC) during a language class. There has been much work done investigating the role of the learner's stable personal characteristics (traits) along with their situational changes at a specific time (states) that influence the student's... 

Service oriented architecture is based on the provision of services. To enhance the performance of the systems by providing a better combination of services, it is necessary to extract more information compared to the one in the service registry. In this regard, the accomplished works have been focusing on the basic concepts of service-oriented architecture. The service composition is based on the information in service registry, provided by the service provider. Further, centralized combination with insufficient information does not meet the system performance requirements. This solution helps to facilitate resource distribution and reduces tasks of the central unit. In this paper, efforts... 

Cupric oxide (CuO) nanostructures are grown on fluorine doped tin oxide (FTO) coated glass substrate using aqueous solution approach. The concentration of precursor's solution has significant impact on morphology of CuO nanostructure. By varying concentration of precursor, the growth of two different morphologies (oriented nanosheets and nanoleaves) is achieved. X-ray diffraction pattern and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy reveals formation of pure CuO crystalline phase. Mott-Schottky characteristic confirms the p-type semiconducting nature. Ultrathin structures of nanoleaves lead to higher light trapping and light absorption in visible-NIR region. The nanoleaves film has lower bandgap in... 

A new conceptual framework of collective orientation in team contexts has recently been proposed in terms of vertical and horizontal dimensions of idiocentrism and allocentrism. A two-phase longitudinal study of 270 university students engaged in 86 academic groups partly confirmed the conceptualization by identifying four interpretable factors: vertical and horizontal idiocentrism, horizontal allocentrism, and avoiding arguments. The results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and a structural model of relationships between the four dimensions in both phases of the study are reported in this article. © 2007 Sage Publications  

We present a new method for the robust estimation of a two-dimensional conducting target orientation using measured radar cross-section data. The method is based on a Generalized Regression Neural Network (GRNN) scheme, which belongs to the family of radial basis neural networks  

The mechanism of oxide desorption from the surface of Si(111) is studied. Oxide layers formed by different chemical treatments were thermally removed in a UHV chamber and the removal process was probed by Auger electron spectroscopy. Results show that the oxide formed by HCl desorbs very fast and the desorption rate is initially almost linear in time, while for oxides formed by HNO3, H2SO4 and NH4OH the rate is initially slow, becoming faster at later times. Similarity in AES spectra of different oxides indicates that the difference in the desorption rates of different oxides cannot be attributed to the difference in chemical environment. Linear increase of void coverage with the square of... 

Agent-oriented software methodologies have found their way to become one of the most important issues of software development. The diversity of existing methodologies and the variety of newly arriving ones have arisen the question of which methodology is best in the context of a special problem, so the need for evaluating and comparing methodologies is becoming more important everyday. On the other hand evaluating methodologies can reveal their strengths and shortcomings which lead to an improvement in development of the next generation of agent-oriented methodologies. In this paper, we are going to introduce an approach for evaluating methodologies via the evaluation of their lifecycle... 

We provide a detailed review of existing object-oriented software development methodologies, focusing on their development processes. The review aims at laying bare their core philosophies, processes, and internal activities. This is done by using a process-centered template for summarizing the methodologies, highlighting the activities prescribed in the methodology while describing the modeling languages used (mainly diagrams and tables) as secondary to the activities. The descriptions produced using this template aim not to offer a critique on the methodologies and processes, but instead provide an abstract and structured description in a way that facilitates their elaborate analysis for... 

Service-Oriented Software Engineering is based on concepts and principles for constructing complex enterprise systems in which services as building block of the system, are distributed in large networks. The main goal of the service-oriented methodologies is to define a process for development and maintenance of service-based systems. Most of the Service-Oriented methodologies are not mature enough compared with traditional software development methodologies such as Object-Oriented or Component-Based. Hence, defining an evaluation framework will be useful for comparing methodologies for identifying their strengths and weaknesses, defining new methodologies or extending existing... 

This study investigates different types of career orientation of a sample of Iranian software engineers and antecedents of these orientations. A qualitative study was conducted in seven Iranian small to large sized companies, where forty-nine software engineers were interviewed. Using the thematic analysis technique, technical, managerial, entrepreneurial, project based, and hybrid orientations were identified. For some orientations, several sub-orientations were also identified. In addition, the results propose some antecedents of career orientation, mainly based on engineer needs, competencies and values, which may be moderated by some external factors, including organizational and... 

Situational Method Engineering (SME) is a branch of software engineering which helps develop bespoke methodologies to fit the specific characteristics of the software project at hand. As in software development, SME too involves rigorous Requirements Engineering (RE), so much so that if requirements elicitation and definition is mishandled in any way, methodology development will most likely fail as a result. In this paper, we propose a Feature-driven methodology for SME; in this SME methodology, the requirements of the target methodology are captured as Features. First introduced in the agile FDD (Feature-Driven Development) methodology, Features are fully object-oriented and provide all... 

It has become essential to scrutinize and evaluate software development methodologies, mainly because of their increasing number and variety. Evaluation is required to gain a better understanding of the features, strengths, and weaknesses of the methodologies. The results of such evaluations can be leveraged to identify the methodology most appropriate for a specific context. Moreover, methodology improvement and evolution can be accelerated using these results. However, despite extensive research, there is still a need for a feature/criterion set that is general enough to allow methodologies to be evaluated regardless of their types. We propose a general evaluation framework which addresses...