Sharif Digital Repository

Dealing with complicated organizational situations in the current competitive and uncertain market requires making the best management decisions at the earliest time possible. As making the best decisions requires the possession of adequate and accurate knowledge, knowledge has become the most valuable asset of organizations. Knowledge Management (KM) spans managing the identification, capture, storage, sharing, usage and creation of knowledge. Using an appropriate Knowledge Management System (KMS) can ensure the provision of essential knowledge for decision making, and can manage the complexity of the competitive market by maintaining and managing the relevant organizational knowledge.... 

The existing continual learning methods are mainly focused on fully-supervised scenarios and are still not able to take advantage of unlabeled data available in the environment. Some recent works tried to investigate semi-supervised continual learning (SSCL) settings in which the unlabeled data are available, but it is only from the same distribution as the labeled data. This assumption is still not general enough for real-world applications and restricts the utilization of unsupervised data. In this work, we introduce Open-Set Semi-Supervised Continual Learning (OSSCL), a more realistic semi-supervised continual learning setting in which out-of-distribution (OoD) unlabeled samples in the... 

Today, smart devices have become an integral part of everyday life. The Android operating system is also the most popular operating system of these devices, and as a result, various malwares are produced and distributed for this operating system every day. This makes it especially important to investigate these malwares. This includes finding people involved in the development and distribution of malware, as well as discovering other malwares created by them. Discovering other involved entities, such as social media accounts, websites, Android store accounts, and taking steps to prevent malware from being distributed by them is another aspect of this story. In order to deal with organized... 

Nowadays sharing data between users and organizations can be difficult due to privacy and legal reasons. Therefore, real-world data is not fully exploited by machine learning methods. A novel model training method called Federated Learning was proposed to alleviate the aforementioned problem by enabling users to jointly train learning models without sharing data. Federated learning utilization faces many challenges among which high communication cost, statistical heterogeneity and system heterogeneity are most important. This research deals with these challenges by proposing two methods of Reduced Clustering Federated Learning (RCFL) and Weighted Federated Distillation (WFD). Moreover, we... 

In recent years the advent of internet and web has transformed the process of data collection and make organizational and environmental data more accessible. On the one hand, many organizations have realized that the knowledge in these huge databases is key to supporting the various organizational decisions. Particularly, the knowledge about customers from these databases is critical for the marketing function. But, much of this useful knowledge is hidden and untapped. On the other hand, the intense competition and increased choices available for customers have created new pressures on marketing decision-makers and there has emerged a need to manage customers in a long-term relationship.... 

Product knowledge is the most precious asset of any manufacturing company, particularly for OKP companies. High level of customization is one characteristic of OKP which means more customer involvements in OKPPD activities, and customer requirements and expectations may be changing at any activity in PD, e.g., at designing stage. As SMEs, OKP companies always have limitation in resources such as machines tools, human resources, cutters, clamps, so managing the limitations is one of the major challenges that must be faced for maximizing the efficiently and productivity. The part of design that involves fuzzy problems and a lot of product knowledge, it is a critical part for the entire PD. In... 

Semantic segmentation is the tash of labeling each pixel of an input image. It is one of the main problems in computer vision and plays an important role in scene understanding. State of the art methods of solving it are based on Convolutional Neural Networhs (CNNs). While many real world tasks like autodriving cars and robot navigation require fast and lightweight models, CNNs inherently tend to give beter accuracy when they are deeper and bigger, and this has raised interest in designing compact networks. Knowledge distillation is one of the popular methods of training compact networhs and helps to transfer a big and powerful network’s knowledge to a small and compact one. In this research... 

Project Management has clearly designed to achieve a successful outcome of the projects. However, without a proper practicing, it might convey a different result. Companies are increasingly using organizational project management in their work to achieve company goals. The purpose of this study is to identify the challenges in Iran for successful implementation of directorial patterns based on the PMBoK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) and PRINCE2 (PRojects IN Controlled Environment-2nd Version). This paper presents the results of a study aiming at investigating the impacts of implementing project management processes of PMBOK and PRINCE2 and themes within Iranian construction... 

In today’s methodical corporate world, processes have been recognized as valuable organizational knowledge assets. Situational Method Engineering (SME) processes are considered particularly valuable because of their effectiveness in building context-specific software processes for developing efficient software systems; thus, they indirectly affect all software-dependent organizational knowledge assets, including organizational processes. It is therefore logical to deduce that managing SME knowledge would improve the efficiency of both SME and organizational processes. Unfortunately, existing SME processes suffer from weaknesses that are rooted in loss of knowledge within method engineering... 

Nowadays risk is one the major concepts of personal and social work aspect. For researchers have been working to propose solutions for risk management in different level of projects. Project risk management has been known to be one of the major research areas conjugated with knowledge management solutions. However no proper solution for fulfilling a proper structure of risk management has been found. The main aim of this thesis is to find a well defined structure to enable the risk management concepts in project management. But the definition of such system is known to be so complicated due to vast area of related requirements which can be found for risk management. Moreover this solution... 

Zero knowledge proofs allow a person (prover) to convince another person (verifier) that he has performed a specific computation on a secret data correctly, and has obtained a true answer, without having to disclose the secret data. QAP (Quadratic Arithmetic Program) based zkSNARKs (zero knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge) are a type of zero knowledge proof. They have several properties that make them attractive in practice, e.g. verifier's work is very easy. So they are used in many areas such as Blockchain and cloud computing. But yet prover's work in QAP based zkSNARKs is heavy, therefore, it may not be possible for a prover with limited processing resource to run... 

Software quality assurance activities such as debugging are considered one of the most important and effective tasks in software development life cycle. However, these activities are tedious and time consuming. Consequently, wide variety of studies have been conduced around the process of software debugging, such as predicting defects,which is one of the most important topics in this area.In spite of the popularity of software libraries and frameworks, and the use of application programming interfaces (API), most of the studies in the defect prediction area have not focused on predicting defects related to API usages. However, due to the lack of documentation and complexity of the APIs... 

This thesis represents results of research about portfolio, program and project management maturity level in South Pars Projects’ contractor organizations. The purpose is to develop an understanding of management maturity regarding these three levels and especially project management in these organizations. Since oil and gas projects have major role in our economy, doing such appraisals cause cost deduction and increasing productivity in these organizations. In this research, contractor organizations and samples from South Pars Projects have been chosen, and then based on P3M3 and Wysocki Maturity Models, which is based on PMBOK standard, and by using their questionnaires appraisal has been... 

One of issues of human in this time is questions about epistemology. Human sometimes faced with this qustion that "Is it any knowledge for human being". Sometime he or she answers this question: yes and search for any knowledge around him or her. In the context of philosophy of science these question are very imortant. In philosophy of science one of major question is how many of factors in science is subjective and how many is objective? It is obvious that one of solution to answer this question is investigation of factors that construct the knowledege. Furthermore in this thesis I try to answer that question in context of Hikmat' Motealieh. In this context all of factors that involved in... 

Hayek is one of the most impressive figures of Austrian School of Economics established by Carl Menger. The Thinkers of this school of thought believed that governments should not intervene in the market process. They argued that such interventions would spoil the market performance in resource allocation. Hayek believes that the order which emerges from the market is a spontaneous one; it means no one has designed it, but it has evolutionarily evolved by distinctive agents' actions who had no plan to make it. Hayek's arguments for spontaneous order are based on some epistemological presuppositions such as: "methodological individualism", "methodological subjectivism", "tacit knowledge" and... 

The complexity of corporate information technology (IT) environments has been growing steadily, and keeping pace with an ever changing business environment has become a constant challenge. Information technology/systems play a major role in improving the competitiveness of organizations. There are numerous enterprise information software packages available on the market. One of them is enterpriser esource planning (ERP). ERP can provide significant improvements in efficiency across a com pany, but only when implemented correctly.In this study we defined ERP system that is called Technosoft ERP system. This system includes six model which ... 

Rail equipment suppliers in the manufacturing realms of activity are obliged to comply by global standards in order to provide the requirement needs of the rail industries and the needs of customers. In this way, the standards would enhance the quality, safety and reliability of the railway industry. International Railway Industry Standard (IRIS), as an exclusively railway standard that is based on or a more refined of the ISO 9001 Quality Management Standard Policies, which adds in fact further layers to the ISO 9001 structure. The IRIS is the result of long term process in development of an international quality management standard for railway fleet. The objective of this thesis is to make... 

In today’s world startups are receiving attention as they play a key role in economic growth and employment in different countries. On the other hand, globalization, rapid change and fierce competition have made the economy more knowledge-based, and this issue has become so special for startups that the main asset of startups can be considered their knowledge capital, including customer knowledge. Considering the role of knowledge in innovation and innovation in the growth and survival of a startup, customer knowledge can be considered an important source for innovation in the startups and also a vital factor for their survival. The purpose of this study is to study the effect of customer... 

One of the features of a project is its uniqueness, if two sets of activities are the same neither of them will longer be included in the project definition. A method in two projects with the same nature may yield inverse results of each other. Therefore, it is necessary to study the parameters affecting the project carefully before any action. So far, some research has been conducted in this area and it has been tried to perform case study on qualitative and quantitative parameters of the project. By investigating a number of common factors in most civil engineering projects, especially megaprojects, the present study attempts to identify and examine exquisite and effective parameters and... 

The rapid technological changes have faced organizations with a new challenge: old and obsolete knowledge when it hampers organizational change or creates some kind of possible negative impact. Hence, in many cases, companies need to actively deal with such old and obsolete knowledge and their possible negative impacts in order to survive in highly competitive market. Defining unlearning as the intentional process of managing the old and obsolete knowledge in order to reduce its possible negative impacts, this study focuses on how organizations manage their old and obsolete knowledge and how the pattern of unlearning actions varies based on different types of knowledge.
Analyzing the...