Sharif Digital Repository

Food choice is one of the most fundamental and most frequent value-based decisions for all animals including humans. However, the neural circuitry involved in food-based decisions is only recently being addressed. Given the relatively fast dynamics of decision formation, electroencephalography (EEG)-informed fMRI analysis is highly beneficial for localizing this circuitry in humans. Here, by using the EEG correlates of evidence accumulation in a simultaneously recorded EEG-fMRI dataset, we found a significant role for the right temporal-parietal operculum (PO) and medial insula including gustatory cortex (GC) in binary choice between food items. These activations were uncovered by using the... 

Past earthquakes revealed that while fulfilling the requirements of the conventional design codes guarantees the life safety of the occupants, considerable economic losses may still be incurred. This highlights the importance of considering life cycle losses in the design procedure of structures. In this research, the significance of the life cycle seismic risk costs in the optimal design of steel framed tube tall buildings is investigated. Typical 20- and 40-story buildings are optimally designed based on three approaches: the code-based, the cost-based, and the fixed weight approach. The first approach only minimizes the initial cost of the building while in the second and third approaches... 

The endurance time method is a time history dynamic analysis in which structures are subjected to predesigned intensifying excitations. This method provides a tool for response prediction that correlates structural responses to the intensity of earthquakes with a considerably less computational demand as compared to conventional time history analysis. The endurance time method is being used in different areas of earthquake engineering, such as performance-based assessment and design, life-cycle cost-based design, value-based design, seismic safety, seismic assessment, and multi-component seismic analysis. Successful implementation of the endurance time method relies heavily on the quality of... 

A framework for optimal seismic design of structures, considering maximum value as the design objective, is introduced. In this framework, the value parameter incorporates a comprehensive set of performance indicators. Decision indicators are mapped into equivalent economic values and are directly involved in the design process. This approach leads to optimal assignment of the available resources to meet infrastructure requirements. The construction cost and the risk of seismic consequences are considered as the value components. FEMA-P58 methodology is utilized in estimation of the seismic consequences including the repair cost, repair time, injuries and casualties. Endurance Time method is... 

A new design methodology based on the total value of structures is introduced. This methodology, namely Value Based Design of structures (VBD), uses the advantages of Endurance Time (ET) method. While prescriptive and earlier generations of performance based design approaches commonly try to find structures with the least initial cost, a design approach to directly incorporate the concept of value in design procedure has been formulated here. Reduced computational effort in ET analysis provides the prerequisites to practical use of optimization algorithms in seismic design. A genetic algorithm is used with the objective of minimizing total cost of the building during its lifespan. ET method... 

The main issue in a surveillance environment is the target tracking. The most important concern in this problem is the association of the various measurements with the existing target tracks. The fuzzy c-means data association (FCMDA) algorithm, based on the fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm, is an efficient solution for the problem of measurement to track association in a multisensor multitarget environment. It has a high accuracy in measurement to track association when targets are far from each other. However, its accuracy remains low when targets are close to one another. The FCMDA algorithm performance is usually lost in this environment, especially when measurement noise is high. In the... 

Motivated by the problem of automatically composing network accessible services, such as those on the World Wide Web, this paper proposes an approach to exploit all semantic information available for semantic web services to complete this task. For semantic web services, we propose a prioritized and limited list of other web services, with composability measure value based on feasibility of being succeeding service in a composition to fulfill the request. Due to the fact that in semantic web services, semantic information- all description and signatures- is defined by ontology language, we use some of the mapping rules to estimate a correlation between services for composability. Then we...