Sharif Digital Repository

Quality of Experience (QoE) indicates the overall quality of one service such as Voice over IP (VoIP) from users' point of view by considering several systems, human, and contextual factors. QoE measurement and prediction are more challenging than Quality of Service (QoS) which is only related to network parameters. There exist various objective and subjective methods for QoE prediction. This research investigates various features affecting QoE by proposing a comprehensive subjective evaluation by employing a large number of users. We show that many unconsidered factors including speaker specifications and signal properties, such as signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), can affect QoE so that the SNR... 

Increasing relations between different cultures necessitates easier and more affordable methods of translation between different languages. Hence, using computers as Translators has been very attractive to many governmental and commercial organizations as well as scientific community since the very beginning of the computer era. So far, different approaches to MT have been proposed. Two of the main approaches to MT are Statistical MT and Rule-Based MT. Unlike Statistical MT, which uses statistical information for translation, Rule-Based MT utilizes precise linguistic information to understand the source and generate the target language. This inguisitic information is usually encoded as a... 

Existing Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are not designed to deal with all categories of processing environments. This thesis focuses on IDSs for the Grid computing environment, and concentrates on feature selection and performance. An existing framework, Globus, is used as the basis for the consideration and development of the research issue in Grid computing. The system is based on two engine designs: (a) Signature and (b) Support Vector Machine; SVM has been selected for pattern discovery in traffic analysis. We found that the performance of the system greatly depends on the efficiency of the underlying framework and the number of Intrusion Detection System instances. We demonstrate... 

Human face detection is an important research area with several applications such as human computer interface (HCI), face recognition, surveillance systems, security systems, and content-based image retrieval (CBIR). Face detection problem can be stated as “determining whether there are human faces in the image” and if there are “returning the location of each human face in the image” regardless of its position, size, scale, orientation, and lighting condition. In this thesis, we have proposed a new face detection method which combines the AdaBoost algorithm with skin color information and support vector machine (SVM). First, a cascade classifier based on AdaBoost is used to detect faces in... 

The Machinable Austempered Ductile Iron (MADI), a new group of Austempered Ductile Iron (ADI), has been developed to remove the problems (hardness and cost) of ADI cast iron. MADI is a special kind of ductile iron which has proper machinabilty properties. This kind of ductile iron can be produced using a specific chemical composition and defined heat treatment process. By providing these conditions, the hardness of the cast iron will be in the range of as-cast cast iron. On the other hand, because of the especial production process, the cost of the final shape casting will be lower than ADI cast iron. In the present work, firstly the effect of heat treatment parameters, including the time... 

Recently many works has been focused on Automatic Security Systems. Car type and color recognition systems are needed in vehicle based access control systems in buildings, outdoor sites and even housing estates. Another usage of car type and color recognition is when a certain model of car is being investigated in highways and streets. In this thesis two independent systems are designed; one for car type recognition and another for car color recognition. They both require to know the license plate location, so we proposed a license plate detection system. In the license plate detection system, first the plate candidates are extracted from image by gradient and morphological operations, then... 

Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) are an example of a simple processor used to accomplish simple processing tasks in many applications. They can be found in PDA’s, mp3 players, and other portable electronic devices. ARM processors have small instruction sets and basic processor architecture, and they can be modeled in transaction level by SystemC. SystemC is one of many high level programming languages used to write hardware descriptive codes. We have chosen TLM in SystemC so that abstract data types can be used for higher level modeling and faster simulation. System architects and embedded software developers are accepting transaction level modeling into their design flow because it addresses... 

Switched Reluctance Generator (SRG) has some unique features such as low cost, simple and rugged structure and high performance operation in wide range of speed. These features make the SRG one of the best candidates for optimum power generation. SRG has used as starter-alternator in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEV) and aircrafts. An SRG drive system operates by exciting the SRG phases with a DC voltage source and then discharging the stored and developed magnetic energy to the connected DC supply. Therefore, output power of a Switched Reluctance Generator directly depends on the excitation angles when operates in the Single Pulse Mode. In this dissertation the goal is to control a SRG in the... 

In this thesis one of the sensorless methods which exploits the existing anisotropies of the rotor is utilized to estimate rotor position. In order to implement this method, first a high frequency voltage is injected in a specific, time-varying direction and then the corresponding current response would be observed in order to estimate the rotor saliency position. The estimation of rotor position would be more precise as the magnetic anisotropy due to rotor saliency increases and as a result the effect of noise and different disturbances in estimation of rotor position would be decresed. The effect of stator resistence is one of these disturbances which is usually neglected as a result of... 

Washing a dead person’s body and dressing the corpse prior to burial is an act of love and necessity in many religions. Since the deceased loses all bodily functions at time of death, cleaning the body to eliminate odors is generally a hard and unpleasant task for many to perform. It has also been reported that tens of thousands of microbes are present on every square centimeter of a human corpse which is always a health risk to the persons performing the task. Among Islamic nations, preparation of the corpse is usually carried out in washing rooms (Ghassalkhaneh) of cemeteries in large cities. This preparation consists of two important operations namely as washing of the corpse (Ghosl)... 

The most important step in current dynamic analysis of machine foundations is determining dynamic impedance functions. Impedance functions are defined as ratios of applied force or moment to induced displacement or rotation angle of foundation. In this research, horizontal dynamic response of foundation on homogeneous halfspace was investigated using physical modeling. Soil medium was built in a 1mx1mx0.8m steel box whose interior walls were covered by 0.1m of sawdust (a material with high damping). In order to prevent possible reflection of waves, this cover was extended to the box bottom with 0.2 m thickness. Sand raining method was used to build soil medium. In this method, with... 

Gesture and motion evaluation are needed for a variety of applications. The use of human hand motions as a natural interface tool has motivated researchers to conduct research in the modeling, analysis and evaluation of various hand movements. In particular, human-computer intelligent interaction has been a focus of research in vision-based gesture recognition. In this work, we introduce a 3-D hand model evaluation method that offers flexible and elaborate representation of hand motion. We used landmarked points on tips and joints of the fingers and calculated the 3-D coordinates of these points through a stereo vision system followed by an HMM (Hidden Markov Model) to recognize hand... 

In this research, we introduce a semi-supervised manifold regularization framework for hu- man pose estimation. Here we aim the three major challenges in discriminative human pose estimation. We utilize the unlabeled data to reduce the need to labeled data and compen- sate for the complexities in the input space. We model the underlying manifold by a nearest neighbor graph. Due to depth ambiguity which is the main challenge in this problem, the true underlying manifold of the data bends and gets too close to itself is some areas which results in poor graph construction. To solve this problem, we argue that the optimal graph is a subgraph of the k-nearest neighbor graph and employ an... 

Islanding detection methods are divided into three main groups as remote, active and passive. Although passive schemes have larger Non Detection Zones (NDZ) relative to other schemes, they are more used in utilities due to their low costs and less PQ problems than in other schemes. Passive Schemes are based on the measurements of passive system parameters. These parameters are measured at the point of common coupling (PCC). A new approach in passive techniques is the use of data-mining to classify the system parameters which affect the islanding detection. Therefore, by finding an efficient and robust data-mining algorithm, the inherent problem of passive schemes, which is their relatively... 

Increasing emissions of greenhouse gases from one hand and decline in the fossile resources of energy on the other hand has raised the motivation of searching for renewable sources. Biodiesel, because of having perfect feature for replacing with petroleum diesel, has been considered as candidate for this purpose. Using enzymatic reaction is one of the methods for biodiesel production. Understanding the kinetics of this reaction is important to achieve higher production rates. In present work, the kinetic of transesterification of castor oil with use of Novozyme 435 (as enzyme) was investigated. Enzymatic biodiesel production is a bi-substrate (oil and alcohol) reaction. Genetic algorithm was... 

Considering the significant role of process plans in computer-aided manufacturing, a lot of researches have been conducted to fulfill the gap between the different aspects of process planning systems. However, there is still a wide gap for process planning systems to completely fulfill the requirements. In this research an expert system for turning operation is proposed. The system is capable of suggesting appropriate machining parameters with the aid of an inference engine. The proposed system has an integrated data structure based on ISO 10303 (STEP) standard for both geometric design data and machining parameters. In this system, geometric design data is stored in a database with a data... 

Synchronous machines is one of the most popular machines in industry and in power plants. Because the dynamic of this machine is nonlinear, it can exhibit complex behaviors. In this project we have studied a special case in Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machines. A case in which speed of rotor, frequency, currents amplitude and voltages amplitude change in an irregular manner. This special case is called chaos. Chaos occurs for some specific values of parameters and inputs. In this study in the first step, we have tried to find the chaotic area of parameters of system (Prediction of chaos). Then in the next step, we have designed some controllers which can eliminate chaos in the system. The... 

Nowadays, by increasing the applications of robots in military, industry and also home usages, researchers are looking for the most efficient algorithms to control the robots. As Prof. Zadeh presented the fuzzy systems in 1965 as a proper probabilistic logic, fuzzy control has been developed and now is one of the most applicable procedures in new aspects of controlling because of its less required computational capacity and more proper stability. Although the human like and quadruped robots are more applicable because of their coincidence with more difficult conditions compared to the wheeled robots, more complicated methods should be implemented to control them.The main subject of this... 

Google Inc. states that, 400 million Android-powered devices have been activated and used by people until 2012. This rapid growth of Android operating system in mobile phones and other electronic devices makes it very important to improve the efficiency of this Operating System. Dalvik is the underlying virtual machine (VM) in Android that executes Android-based applications, and hence, its performance directly affects Android-powered devices. De-virtualization is a technique to improve performance of VMs. In this method, VM’s instructions (bytecode) are natively and directly executed by hardware. In addition, de-virtualization technique eliminates the software interpretation/translation... 

Temporal relation classification is one of the contemporary demanding tasks in natural language processing. This task can be used in various applications such as question answering, summarization, and language specific information retrieval. Temporal relation classification methods can be categorized into three main groups of supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised (based on the type of the training data that they need). In this thesis, we have two main goals: first, improving accuracy of temporal relation learning, and second, decreasing supervision of algorithm as much as possible. For achieving these goals, three main steps are proposed. In the first step, we propose an improved...