Sharif Digital Repository

The ubiquity of broadband digital communications and mass storage in modern society has stimulated the widespread acceptance of digital media. However, easy access to royalty-free digital media has also resulted in a reduced perception in society of the intellectual value of digital media and has promoted unauthorised duplication practices. To detect and discourage the unauthorised duplication of media, researchers have investigated watermarking methods to embed ownership data into media. However, some authorities have expressed doubt over the efficacy of watermarking methods to protect digital media. The paper introduces a novel method to discourage unauthorised duplication of digital... 

In recent years, soft computing methods, like fuzzy logic and neural networks have been presented and developed for the purpose of mobile robot trajectory tracking. In this paper we will present a fuzzy approach to the problem of mobile robot path tracking for the CEDRA rescue robot with a complicated kinematical model. After designing the fuzzy tracking controller, the membership functions and rule weights will be optimized by genetic algorithm in order to obtain more acceptable results. Simulation results have demonstrated significant improvements in controller efficacy  

This paper deals with the problem of multi-agent learning of a population of players, engaged in a repeated normal-form game. Assuming boundedly-rational agents, we propose a model of social learning based on trial and error, called "social reinforcement learning". This extension of well-known Q-learning algorithm, allows players within a population to communicate and share their experiences with each other. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed learning algorithm, a number of simulations on the benchmark game of "Battle of Sexes" has been carried out. Results show that supplementing communication to the classical form of Q-learning, significantly improves convergence speed towards... 

A general method for deriving electromagnetic particle in cell (EMPIC) algorithms has been given by Eastwood [Comput. Phys. Commun. 64, 252 (1991)]. This method devises variation of the action-integral to find discrete governing equations. The most important advantage of this method is automatic inclusion of the time coordinate via the action integral into the computational domain. This inclusion is inevitable because electromagnetic algorithms are based on time evolution of the system from its initial state. The drawback of this method is that it is rather abstract. This causes obscurity of particle-mesh interactions and makes it hard to analyze physical treatments of the computational... 

An analytical solution is presented to study the heat transfer characteristics of the combined pressure - electroosmotically driven flow in planar microchannels. The physical model includes the Joule heating effect to predict the convective heat transfer coefficient in two dimensional microchannels. The velocity field, which is a function of external electrical field, electroosmotic mobility, fluid viscosity and the pressure gradient, is obtained by solving the hydrodynamically fully-developed laminar Navier-Stokes equations considering the electrokinetic body force for low wall zeta potentials. Then, assuming a thermally fully-developed flow, the temperature distribution and the Nusselt... 

We aim to propose a novel fiber Raman amplifier modeling based on the moment method, which is previously introduced for modeling the inhomogeneous Erbium doped fiber amplifiers and recently employed to analyze the fiber Raman amplifier with continuous pump spectrum. In this model, the number of governing equations is independent of the number of signals and according to the degree of accuracy it is proportional to the number of pumps. This method is employed to analyze the Raman fiber amplifiers with an arbitrary input signal line shape and to minimize the gain ripple of the fiber Raman amplifier with respect to the pump powers and pump frequencies. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved  

For the reason that flow expansion model (developed in our previous work) for evaluating mass transfer during droplet formation involves with manifest hydrodynamic aspects, in this research computational simulation of this phenomenon was done for characterization of hydrodynamics effects on the mass transfer during droplet formation. For this purpose, an Eulerian volume tracking computational code based on volume of fluid (VOF) method was developed to solve the transient Navier-Stokes equations for the axisymmetric free-boundary problem of a Newtonian liquid that is dripping vertically and breaking as drops into another immiscible Newtonian fluid. The effects of hydrodynamics effects on the... 

Discriminative subspace analysis is a popular approach for a variety of applications. There is a growing interest in subspace learning techniques for face recognition. Principal component analysis (PCA) and eigenfaces are two important subspace analysis methods have been widely applied in a variety of areas. However, the excessive dimension of data space often causes the curse of dimensionality dilemma, expensive computational cost, and sometimes the singularity problem. In this paper, a new supervised discriminative subspace analysis is presented by encoding face image as a high order general tensor. As face space can be considered as a nonlinear submanifold embedded in the tensor space, a... 

As computer simulation increasingly supports engineering design, the requirement for a computer software environment providing an integration platform for computational engineering software increases. A key component of an integrated environment is the use of computational engineering to assist and support solutions for complex design. In the present paper, an integrated software environment is demonstrated for multi-disciplinary computational modeling of structural and geotechnical problems. The SUT-DAM is designed in both popularity and functionality with the development of user-friendly pre- and post-processing software. Pre-processing software is used to create the model, generate an... 

Today, the Internet is used to offer different services to users. Most of these services are designed for human users, but unfortunately some computer programs are designed which abuse these services. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Human Apart) systems are designed to automatically distinguish between human users and computer programs and block such computer programs. Most of current CAPTCHA methods are using visual patterns and hence blind users cannot use them. In this paper, we propose a new CAPTCHA method which is designed for blind people. In this method, a small sound clip is played for the user and he/she is asked to say a word. Then the user... 

Here we are concerned with the existence of periodic solution for nonlinear non-autonomous third order system of ordinary differential equations with singular terms. Our method here is based on the topological method in the sense that we conclude some computable results for the focal system from a homotopic nonsingular system. The aim is to obtain sufficient conditions for which the system has periodic solution whenever the value of deformation with respect to the first variation of the nonsingular subsystem is sufficiently small. The method presented here is constructive in the sense that the existence of periodic orbits can be verified numerically as well as computed if any. For this, we... 

This paper considers a project scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing resource availability costs required to execute the activities in a project by a given project deadline. The project contains activities interrelated by finish-start-type precedence relations with a time lag of zero, which require a set of renewable resources. Two metaheuristics, path relinking and genetic algorithm, are developed to tackle this problem in which a schedule is created with a precedence feasible priority list given to the schedule generation scheme. In these procedures, each new generation of solutions are created using the combination of current solutions. Comparative computational results... 

Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs), a single DNA base varying from one individual to another, are believed to be the most frequent form responsible for genetic differences. Genotype is the conflated information of a pair of haplotypes on homologous chromosomes. Although haplotypes have more information for disease associating than individual SNPs and genotype, it is substantially more difficult to determine haplotypes through experiments. Hence, computational methods which can reduce the cost of determining haplotypes become attractive alternatives. MEC, as a standard model for haplotype reconstruction, is fed by fragments as input to infer the best pair of haplotypes with minimum error...