Sharif Digital Repository

Purpose: This study aims to explore the emergence and development of new industries, especially in the context of developing countries, by considering industry emergence and development as a large-scale institutional change or transition. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted an inductive case study research on the emergence of the biopharmaceutical industry in a developing country. The data on the emergence and development of Iran’s biopharmaceutical industry during 1990 and 2018 were collected through semi-structured interviews, participation in meetings, visits to companies and analysis of archival texts. The data analysis was an inductive and iterative process. Findings: In... 

Single-task learning in artificial neural networks will be able to learn the model very well, and the benefits brought by transferring knowledge thus become limited. In this regard, when the number of tasks increases (e.g., semantic segmentation, panoptic segmentation, monocular depth estimation, and 3D point cloud), duplicate information may exist across tasks, and the improvement becomes less significant. Multi-task learning has emerged as a solution to knowledge-transfer issues and is an approach to scene understanding which involves multiple related tasks each with potentially limited training data. Multi-task learning improves generalization by leveraging the domain-specific information... 

Purpose: The purpose of this research was to model the impact of customer knowledge on the performance of organization with a focus on information technology industry. Furthermore, it is intended to analyze the effect of customer knowledge investment on the performance measures, by reviewing investment policies. Design/methodology/approach: The relationship between customer knowledge and performance measures was specified using literature review and grounded theory method. The system dynamics approach was then applied to analyze the impact of the customer knowledge on the performance measures. Findings: This study provided a dynamic model on the causal relationship between customer knowledge... 

[Context and Motivation] Software requirements are affected by the knowledge and confidence of software engineers. Analyzing the interrelated impact of these factors is difficult because of the challenges of assessing knowledge and confidence. [Question/Problem] This research aims to draw attention to the need for considering the interrelated effects of confidence and knowledge on requirements quality, which has not been addressed by previous publications. [Principal ideas/results] For this purpose, the following steps have been taken: 1) requirements quality was defined based on the instructions provided by the ISO29148:2011 standard, 2) we selected the symptoms of low qualified... 

Much efforts have been made in the area of energy security in recent years, but due to its wide scope, it is necessary to review relevant knowledge activities and to analyze the state of knowledge of the field of energy security measurement. The purpose of this article is to present a comprehensive map of knowledge in the field of energy security. For this reason, many documents and articles have been collected during the period 2002–2019 using 7 large and reputable scientific databases as well as 53 different journals, 90% white Q1 quality. There is employed meta-synthesis, scientometrics and network analysis. In the initial survey stage where 1290 articles were found, after analyzing the... 

Epistemic uncertainty in seismic hazard analysis is traditionally addressed by utilizing a logic-tree structure with subjective probabilities for branches. However, many studies have argued that probability is not a suitable choice for addressing epistemic uncertainties; in particular in addressing the background knowledge supporting the probabilities. In this regard, the application of imprecise probability (IP) is investigated. It is discussed that IP could provide a flexible tool for a more objective presentation of experts' knowledge. Moreover, the importance of addressing the strength of knowledge and surprises relative to knowledge in seismic hazard analysis along with methods to do... 

The increased amount of multi-modal medical data has opened the opportunities to simultaneously process various modalities such as imaging and non-imaging data to gain a comprehensive insight into the disease prediction domain. Recent studies using Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) provide novel semi-supervised approaches for integrating heterogeneous modalities while investigating the patients’ associations for disease prediction. However, when the meta-data used for graph construction is not available at inference time (e.g., coming from a distinct population), the conventional methods exhibit poor performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel semi-supervised approach named GKD... 

Nowadays, Smooth Projective Hash Functions (SPHFs) play an important role in constructing cryptographic tools such as secure Password-based Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) protocol in the standard model, oblivious transfer, and zero-knowledge proofs. Specifically, in this paper, we focus on constructing PAKE protocol; that is, a kind of key exchange protocol which needs only a low entropy password to produce a cryptographically strong shared session key. In spite of relatively good progress of SPHFs in applications, it seems there has been little effort to build them upon quantum-resistant assumptions such as lattice-based cryptography and code-based cryptography to make them secure... 

Retinoblastoma is the most frequent primary intraocular tumour in childhood. Early detection of retinoblastoma is the key to successful management with a higher chance of survival. This study aims to assess the knowledge of the general population and healthcare providers about retinoblastoma in term of presentation, risk factors, timing for diagnosis, and complications. A cross-sectional study using an online survey was conducted in three Arab countries (Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq) between 28 August and 16 September 2020. The questionnaire tool was constructed based on an extensive literature review to explore the study's aim and objectives. Logistic regression was used to identify... 

This article contributes to the ongoing debate about whether, how, and under what conditions latecomer countries can become producers of new technology and innovation, thereby catching up with technological leaders. Recent work on sectoral systems of innovation and in the evolutionary economics literature suggests that successful latecomers can move into new technological or industrial domains. They specialise in domains that present more frequent windows of opportunity, shorter technological cycles, flatter learning curves and easier access to relevant knowledge than others. This study investigates the role and significance of two hitherto neglected dimensions of technological regimes that... 

The article offers a different interpretation of Antony Flew's views about the problem of religious language. This interpretation shows that Flew's ideas can be perceived as a critique of belief in the content of religious statements, rather than a critique of their meaning. By interpreting his thought in this way, it is clear that Flew's approach is not new and we can find similar ideas in the history of theological thought. In connection with this interpretation, the authors analyze prevalent theories related to this problem in order to identify the principal doctrines used to find a new solution. In this regard, the new potential solution is assessed in order to complete the approach... 

Extensive studies have examined the effect of variables such as demographic characteristics, insomnia, and working conditions of drivers individually on inattention-related error as well as expression of anger in driving. Nevertheless, so far no study has tested the concurrent effect of these factors on crashes. This study has dealt with indirect investigation of the effect of variables including demographic characteristics, insomnia, and working conditions of drivers on inattention-related error and expression of anger in driving (as mediation model). Next, the effect of these two variables on the probability of incidence of road crashes has been assessed among truck drivers. For this... 

Despite all fundamental divergences, the similarities formed between some interpretations of the later-Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion and the tradition of Islamic Mysticism (Sufism), can yet be philosophically recognized. These basic analogies are as follows: 1) The inextricability of belief and practice and the priority of practice over knowledge 2) The characterization of the core religious beliefs as the primal ground of man’s perception and understanding, in contrast to the view that considers fundamental religious beliefs as theoretical conclusions derived from purely rational courses of reflection 3) A new practice-laden narrative of religious realism. Given that, one can even... 

Recompression is a prevalent form of multimedia content manipulation. Different approaches have been developed to detect this kind of alteration for digital images of well-known JPEG format. However, they are either limited in performance or complex. These problems may arise from different quality level options of JPEG compression standard and their combinations after recompression. Inspired from semantic and perceptual analyses, in this paper, we suggest a part-level middle-out learning strategy to detect double compression via an architecturally efficient classifier. We first demonstrate that singly and doubly compressed data with different JPEG coder settings lie in a feature space... 

The main goal of environmental education program developers is to train resourceful experts to work, study and solve environmental issues. Thus, it is essential to conform educational knowledge and skills according to countries needs along with scientific and technological progress. The present study aimed to assess needs of educational programs by considering climate change issues in Iranian Universities. Therefore, needs of higher education sector have been identified and some recommendations were given in line with objectives of training programs. The study applied random selection method to determine a number of environmental professionals to answer the designed questioner. Delphi method... 

The main goal of environmental education program developers is to train resourceful experts to work, study and solve environmental issues. Thus, it is essential to conform educational knowledge and skills according to countries needs along with scientific and technological progress. The present study aimed to assess needs of educational programs by considering climate change issues in Iranian Universities. Therefore, needs of higher education sector have been identified and some recommendations were given in line with objectives of training programs. The study applied random selection method to determine a number of environmental professionals to answer the designed questioner. Delphi method... 

Purpose: Motivated by the high cost of material movements in road construction projects, past studies have used analytical methods to optimize materials logistics plans. A key shortcoming of these methods is their inability to capture the uncertain, dynamic and complex characteristics of the road construction material logistics. Failure to incorporate these characteristics can lead to sub-optimal results. The purpose of this study is to propose the use of discrete event simulation (DES) to address the existing shortfall. Design/methodology/approach: Despite the powerful capabilities of DES models in capturing the operational complexities of construction projects, they have not been... 

The use of smart and complicated technologies in manufacturing industries has brought new issues to the maintenance systems in recent years. In this research, an intensive literature review is performed to identify and classify these issues. Inspired by the recent advances that Building Information Modeling (BIM) has brought to the construction industry, the research proposes adopting BIM in manufacturing maintenance systems to address the existing issues. A list of BIM capabilities utilized for addressing maintenance issues of buildings is extracted from the literature. It is argued that these BIM capabilities can also solve similar maintenance issues found in manufacturing industries. A... 

The present article aims to investigate the cause-and-effect relationship between the employees’ psychological empowerment (PE) and dimensions of knowledge management (KM) in an oil company, using the fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory method. The study population consists of oil company experts. The sample size is determined based on the theoretical saturation limit. The present findings show that PE is the strongest causative factor with significant effects on knowledge creation (KC) and knowledge dissemination (KD). Among the KM dimensions, the most influential factors are the dimensions of KC, knowledge application, and knowledge capture (KCA). Of all KM dimensions,... 

After a brief review of the relationship between science and value, this paper introduces the value of ‘traditionality’ as a value in the pure and applied sciences. Along with other recognized values, this value can also contribute to formulating hypotheses and determining theories. There are three reasons for legitimizing the internal role of this value in science: first, this value can contribute to scientific progress by presenting more diverse hypotheses; second, the value of external consistency in science entails this value; and third, this value helps to eliminate some of the adverse social and cultural effects of Western science in non-Western societies. ‘Traditionality’ is an...