Sharif Digital Repository

Bhaskar, one of the pioneers of critical realism, pursues two aspects in his presentation in order to solve complex problems in the philosophy of science. The first aspect is highlighting and emphasizing the need of philosophy of science for ontology and paying attention to intransitive objects. The second aspect is acknowledging the social nature of science and the consideration of transitive objects of science as materials of knowledge, or in other words, the material causes of knowledge. What is done in this thesis, after a detailed description of Bhaskar's critical realism, is to examine the three categories of rationality, progress, and scientific realism in his view. With a layered... 

Ever increasing demand for higher data rate in wireless communication in the face of limited or underutilized spectral resources has motivated the introduction of cognitive radio for dynamic access to spectrum. In dynamic spectrum access a new type of users called secondary users measure the spectrum to see if it is occupied by licensed users (primary users or PU). When channel is empty secondary users can use it to transmit signal. This approach is called spectrum sensing. Hidden PU problem can severely defect detection ability of non-cooperativ spectrum sensing systems. Cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) uses spatial diversity of spectrum sensors to tackle this problem. There are two kinds... 

In this thesis, we derive an achievable Degrees of Freedom (DoF) region for a MIMO channel that models uplink transmission in a cellular network of two interfering cells with two users in each cell, under two different genie-aided cognitive scenarios; a cognitive cell together with a primary cell, and a cognitive transmitter with a primary transmitter in each cell. Most of the previous works dealt with networks with only two transmitters. Here, we study the effect of increase in the number of transmitters on nullifying and aligning the interference. In each scenario, an outer bound on the DoF region is derived. Then, we evaluate how cognition can improve the maximum achievable DoF by... 

Increased globalization and level of complexity of supply chains have made them more vulnerable to environmental disruptions than ever before. However, conventional methods of risk management can not help supply chains in the face of turmoil and disruption, because of unexpected and unfortunate events due to the unpredictability and uncertainty in which they are. They can have irreversible effects on supply chains and even threaten the very existence of members of these chains. In such a situation, the key to the success and survival of supply chain operations is to achieve supply chain resilience. On the other hand, health care supply chains are one of the most important and vital parts of... 

Due to both dynamic and opportunistic spectrum access, Cognitive radio networks is a promising solution for spectrum scarcity problem. In cognitive radio networks, users need to have a control channels in order to cooperate for sharing the sensing information, channel sharing and etc. In Ad-hoc cognitive radio networks because of the absence of infrastructure and central nodes, every user runs a distributed algorithm to create a common control channel. If the control channel gets jammed, network’s performance degrades dramatically, therefore the jammer’s target in cognitive radio networks is the control channels to disturb the networks’ performance. The traditional solution to confront... 

Cognitive Radio (CR) technology enables dynamic spectrum access (DSA) to overcome the problems of unlicensed bands which is becoming overcrowded. However, providing an acceptable quality of service (QoS) for cognitive users requiresmore sophisticated approachesdut to the existence of primary users (PU) with their high priority over licensed bands. Additionally, reducing interference with primary users so that they can communicate without interruption is of extreme importance. In order to meet cognitive user’s quality of service as much as possible and reduce interference with PUs, a new class-based multipath on-demand routing protocol for cognitive radio networks (CMORC) is proposed. CMORC... 

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has been a research topic for more than a decade, and the range of potential applications has spanned beyond the military domain into commercial domains. A key feature of current WSN solutions is operation in unlicensed frequency bands, for instance, the worldwide available 2.4 GHz band. However, the same band is shared by other wireless applications, such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, as well as other proprietary technologies. There is evidence that unlicensed spectrum is becoming overcrowded, to solve this problem, concept of cognitive radio has been introduced.
A main challenge for routing in cognitive radio wireless sensor networks is the collaboration... 

For neurodegenerative diseases like Multiple Sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s disease early detection is required to slow progression and prevent disease onset. To do so, identifying early signs and symptoms of the disease as well as modifying lifestyle can play a crucial role. Nowadays, the increasing use of smart gadgets and sensors has paved the way for collecting behavioral data and therefore analyzing and extracting meaningful patterns. In this study, lifestyle and cognitive performance data have been collected via a platform called OptiMind. Previous studies have shown that the Integrated Cognitive Assessment (ICA) can identify patients with neurodegenerative disorders (such as... 

How the human nervous system works is one of the most important topics in science and in this topic providing a model of it is scientists' main concern. The human brain that has been formed from a large number of nerve cells lets it do complex computations. The structure of cognition, memorizing and processing which are some of human features are being studied in many fields of science named "brain and cognitive science".
In this study, we will point to modeling of one of the human cognitive phenomena (decision making in problem solving). In this modeling, we aim to connect the microscopic and macroscopic levels of the nervous system to each other.
First, we will give an introduction... 

Reinforcement learning is one of the most well-known learning paradigms in biological agents and one of the most used ones for solving plenty of problems. One of the reasons for this widespread use is the low demand for supervising signals. However, the sparsity of the reward signal causes increasing in sample complexity that needs for learning new tasks. This issue makes trouble in multi-task settings, specifically.One of the most promising approaches to learning new tasks by limited interaction with the environment is meta reinforcement learning. An approach in which fast adaption becomes possible by limiting hypothesis space and creating inductive biases by learning meta parameters.... 

The researches done on legged robots can be categorized in two main groups: based on analytical methods and intelligent methods. All researched done by intelligent methods are similar in adaptation of learning methods. Robots can improve their actions with learning and there is no need to do an exact modeling of environment and system. Also this is adaptive to changes in system and environment. There are different approaches for studying intelligence in cognitive science. Embodiment approach focuses on body, its properties and connection to environment. Controller, morphology and environment effect doing the tasks in embodiment. Morphology contains sensors, shapes of elements, actuators and... 

In recent years, the Cognitive Radio Network has received significant attentions due to its high potential for better employment of the spectrum. One of the most important parts of this technology is the spectrum sensing that requires being fast and accurate. The conventional algorithms proposed so far encounter some fundamental challenges at low SNR regimes and in wideband sensing. On the other hand, the compressed sensing algorithms, which take advantages of the sparsity of the signal of interest and utilize measurements instead of the samples, can reduce the sampling rate and thus decrease the complexity associated with the wideband sensing. In this thesis, by exploiting the... 

Recommender Systems have become an attractive field within the recent decade since they facilitate users’ selection process in limited time. Conventional recommender systems have proposed numerous methods with a focus on recommending to individual users. Recently, due to a significant increase in the number of users, studies in this field have shifted to properly identify groups of people with similar preferences and provide a list of recommendations for each group. Because, offering a recommendations list to each individual undergoes computational cost and sometimes is not possible. So far, most of the previous studies requires the restrictive assumptions such as: (1) limited number of... 

Frequency scarcity has emerged the necessity of opportunistic utilization of frequency bands, which can be realized through a cognitive radio system. During an agile communication between unlicensed users, a cognitive radio system must avoid collision with licensed users. Hence it should continuously observe the band of interest and report the presence of licensed user signals. This task is fulfilled by a vital part of a cognitive radio system, called the spectrum sensing core. Recently several techniques have been proposed for the spectrum sensing in literature. Some of them like matched filtering, cyclostationarity based detection are based on primary user signal features. However energy... 

The process of aging is accompanied by problems that can affect the daily activities of an elderly. Recent studies have shown that the use of virtual reality technology provides a variety of diagnostic methods and clinical systems to prevent and delay cognitive aging to ensure the normal life of the elderly. In this project, efforts have been made to design some virtual reality-based games focusing on memory and recall in the form of three scenarios of finding address, finding car, and virtual-reality based maze game for the elderly to prevent cognitive decline and developing the dementia so that the difficulty of the game level ahead of each elderly can be adjusted according to his or her... 

Deployment of demands, increase in users and new services highlight the necessity of effective frequency allocation i.e. dynamic allocation instead of fixed allocation. Cognitive radio is a proper solution for dynamic frequency allocation. Cognitive radio can scan the spectrum and use the idle bands for transmitting and receiving data. The main part of this radio which is responsible for the most pivotal task is spectrum sensing. Recently, varied methods have been proposed to sense the spectrum. The scope of this research is on designing a very high-speed spectrum sensing system. In this thesis, in order to meet the required scan rate, a tunable complex filter with 40MHz pass-band has... 

In the present thesis we will design and study some rendezvous algorithms for cognitive radio networks. In cognitive radio networks, secondary users try to access the spectrum of primary users in an opportunistic manner. Each secondary user constructs a channel list of accessible resources by channel sensing. These resources are not necessarily the same for different users; therefore, in order to make a connection in absence of a fixed control channel, different secondary users should find each other properly and quickly after entering the network. This is known as the blind rendezvous problem. We will develop and examine a new sequence based algorithm for blind rendezvous. Moreover, some... 

With the ever-increasing communication need for propagating signals in authorized empty bands, the goal of this thesis is based on finding these unused bands and using them,which called Cognitive Radio. In this project, design and implementation of radio frequency building blocks of a receiver in the UHF band (400 to 800 MHz) is performed. In this project, however, the radio frequency building blocks include low noise amplifier, high-frequency quadrature mixers, high-frequency oscillators, tunable low-pass filter,band select filter,phase-locked loop and synthesizer, all of which are introduced, examined and implemented. Moreover, a new method which mitigates the speed limitation is verified.... 

The influence mechanisms of executive/non-executive board compostion on board’s attribution style have been explored. In two case studies, I have examined boards’ causal interpretation about a critical incident which had a significant impact on firm performance. A qualitative research approach has been taken in the case studies. Data was gathered through semi-structured interviews with all board members and was analyzied with the theme analysis method. According to the results, board of directors’ collective attribution formation process can be devided into three stages of members’ expression of information and facts at board meetings, forming the individual judgements of members and at... 

In recent years, with the continuous growth and development of wireless communication systems, the demand for the use of radio spectrum has increased significantly, which has led to problems such as a shortage of spectrum. An effective solution to the spectrum shortage problem is to use cognitive radio. One of the main functions of cognitive radio networks is spectrum sensing and our focus in this study is to examine machine learning and deep learning methods to improve cooperative spectrum sensing. Since channel and noise parameters are not accurate in telecommunication systems, we need to use a method to estimate these parameters. In this regard, the structure of Bayesian with neural...