Sharif Digital Repository

In this study, the self-adaptive evolutionary (SaE) agent is employed to structure the contributing elements to process the management of extreme learning machine (ELM) architecture based on a logical procedure. In fact, the SaE algorithm is utilized for possibility of enhancing the performance of the ELM to estimate daily soil temperature (ST) at 6 different depths of 5, 10, 20, 30, 50 and 100 cm. In the developed SaE-ELM model, the network hidden node parameters of the ELM are optimized using SaE algorithm. The precision of the SaE-ELM is then compared with the ELM model. Daily weather data sets including minimum, maximum and average air temperatures (Tmin, Tmax and Tavg), atmospheric... 

Bayesian inference has traditionally been conceived as the proper framework for the formal incorporation of expert knowledge in parameter estimation of groundwater models. However, conventional Bayesian inference is incapable of taking into account the imprecision essentially embedded in expert provided information. In order to solve this problem, a number of extensions to conventional Bayesian inference have been introduced in recent years. One of these extensions is 'fuzzy Bayesian inference' which is the result of integrating fuzzy techniques into Bayesian statistics. Fuzzy Bayesian inference has a number of desirable features which makes it an attractive approach for incorporating expert... 

Business process reengineering (BPR) assists organisations in improving their internal functions to better achieve their business objectives. Various methodologies have been developed for applying BPR, through which organisational processes are identified, analysed, and improved. However, the need still remains for custom methodologies which are tailored to fit the specific characteristics of organisations and BPR projects. Process patterns are abstract representations of common and effective processes that can be reused as method parts for building custom methodologies; an approach that is commonly referred to as situational method engineering (SME). This study aims to use SME in the... 

This paper compares and quantifies the differences between formants of speech across accents. The crossentropy information measure is used to compare the differences between the formants of vowels of three major English accents British, American and Australian. An improved formant estimation method, based on a linear prediction model feature analysis and a hidden Markov model of formants, is employed for estimation of formant trajectories of vowels and diphthongs. The impact of vocal tract length on accent is also examined. Comparative analysis of formant space of the three accents indicates that these accents are mostly conveyed by the first two formants  

Applying engineering approaches to non-engineering systems such as biological systems has brought a new research filed to the surface. The sole purpose of this research is mathematical modeling the cell cycle control system in the fissionyeast cell using Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE).This paper, in fact, introduces the capabilities of engineering knowledge and engineering of control, in particular, in this field. ©2009 IEEE  

Continuum-based modeling of nanostructures is an efficient and suitable method to study the behavior of these structures when the deformation can be considered homogeneous. This paper is concerned about multiscale nonlinear tensorial constitutive modeling of carbon nanostructures based on the interatomic potentials. The proposed constitutive model is a tensorial equation relating the second Piola-Kirchhoff stress tensor to Green-Lagrange strain tensor. For carbon nanotubes, some modifications are made on the planar representative volume element (RVE) to account for the curved atomic structure resulting a non-planar RVE. Using the proposed constitutive model, the elastic behavior of the... 

In software systems development lifecycle making use of software architecture, especially by taking advantage of architecture styles and patterns, is an essential part which increases product's quality. Nowadays, in order to cover complexity of systems, combination of different architecture styles should be used; therefore ambiguous behaviors might occur. Hence, due to the critical need for toolsets capable of selecting suitable styles and patterns, an environment is proposed in this paper which can perfectly cover different aspects of the implementation of decision support system (DSS). The designed environment obviates data implementation concepts and security considerations. Moreover, it... 

Reliable relative permeability curves of oil-gas systems are important for successful simulation and modeling of gas injection, especially when the miscibility condition approaches. In this work, the relative permeability of a CO2-light oil system has been measured under different conditions, using the Civan and Donaldson (1989) [13] method. Dolomite and sandstone core samples were used in the experiments. The minimum miscibility pressure was calculated using an empirical correlation, as well as slim-tube simulation. Due to some controversial assumptions of the Civan and Donaldson method, such as immiscible and incompressible displacement, history matching was used for predicting the... 

In this paper, two learning automata based adaptive limited fractional guard channel algorithms for cellular mobile networks are proposed. These algorithms try to minimize the blocking probability of new calls subject to the constraint on the dropping probability of the handoff calls. To evaluate the proposed algorithms, computer simulations are conducted. The simulation results show that the performance of the proposed algorithms are close to the performance of the limited fractional guard channel algorithm for which prior knowledge about traffic parameters are needed. The simulation results also show that the proposed algorithms outperforms the recently introduced dynamic guard channel... 

Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANET) due to different characteristics from wired networks are more vulnerable to security attacks. Construction of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) for MANETs is complicated by the fact that they are lack of fixed infrastructure and lack of central management for authentication and distribution of cryptographic keys. On the other hand, the network lifetime is an important issue in MANETs because of the energy power of mobile nodes is limited. In this paper is presented a proposed Method that in the first step, authorized nodes are detected by non-interactive zero knowledge technique and in the second step, nodes with the highest battery power from among authorized... 

The main concern for most organizations in this age, which has been called the age of knowledge-based economy, is their success and superiority in competitive markets. Reviewing the parameters that might have been effective on the success of operationalizing a knowledge management project leads us to a potential factor as knowledge architecture. With regard to the significant effect of knowledge management in the efficiency of organizations and the inclination of current organizations toward large-scale, we try to come up with a suitable architectural framework in such organizations. The initial structure of the framework was established based on the information architectural framework of... 

Nicanfar and Leung proposed a multilayer consensus elliptic curve based password authenticated key-exchange (MCEPAK) protocol for smart grid. They claimed that their protocol is secure against possible attacks. In this paper, we show that the MCEPAK protocol is vulnerable to the dictionary attack and an adversary can obtain the passwords of the appliances by eavesdropping the communicated messages in the protocol. Moreover, we state that the passwords can be discovered by curious operators of the building area networks and the neighbor area networks. Theses weaknesses motivated us to introduce a chaotic maps based authenticated key exchange protocol for smart grid. To the best of our... 

Successful design and implementation of knowledge management systems have been the main concern of many researchers. It has been reported that more than 50% of knowledge management systems have failed, therefore, it is required to seek for a new and comprehensive scientific approach to design and implement it. In the design and implementation of a knowledge management system, it is required to know 'what we want to achieve' and 'how and by what processes we will achieve it'. A literature review conducted and axiomatic design theory selected for this purpose. For the first time, this paper develops a conceptual design of knowledge management systems by means of a hierarchical structure,... 

This paper investigates the accumulation of technological capability in latecomer suppliers of complex capital goods by exploring the issue in an Iranian supplier of large hydro electricity generation systems. The findings suggest that, contrary to the conventional paths of catch-up in Asian and Latin American mass-producing electronics firms, and instead of starting from early stages of product lifecycle, the technological capabilities in this case were acquired through a non-linear movement within the stages of designing and installing complex capital goods in projects: starting from the middle stage (engineering and realisation of complex goods in projects), moving to the last stage... 

The debate over innovativeness of large firms and SMEs, which was bolded by Schumpeter, still continues under mixed empirical evidences. There are several implications for this debate including policy orientation in support of large firms or SMEs. But there is a scarce of studies in developing countries and no such study in Iran yet. The present study has explored the proportionality of increase of innovation activity versus firm size within 522 Iranian knowledge-based firms categorized in 9 industries. Innovation activity was measured by R&D expenditure while firm size stood for number of employees. Using log–log regression in the first phase, it was found that R&D expenditure confirms a... 

In this paper, the impact of a small variations in the channel gains on the secrecy rate of the wiretap channel is studied, in which it is assumed that the imperfect channel knowledge is available at the transmitter. First, we consider general additive noise model for both legitimate and eavesdropper channels in the wiretap channel, and compute the variation of the secrecy rate resulting from the small variations in the channel gains. Then, we focus on the Gaussian wiretap channel, as a special case and calculate the sensitivity of the secrecy capacity to the channel gains with imperfect channel knowledge. Interestingly, it is shown that in some situations the effect of the channel variation... 

As firms are facing with a new competitive environment which knowledge has a unique position, they should give more consideration to their employer's knowledge, and construction firms are not an exception. Employers are creating values for companies, and nowadays they are counted as strategic resources. In construction firms, due to their project based nature, workers are more important in creating values. One of the most essential elements of a construction firm is its ability to cope with social and environmental pressures to reduce waste and minimise the use of raw materials. To decrease wastes of Steel structure Construction, it is necessary to enhance the weld quality. Weld quality... 

Self-adaptive systems are systems that automatically adapt in response to environmental and internal changes, such as possible failures and variations in resource availability. Such systems are often realized by a MAPE-K feedback loop, where Monitor, Analyze, Plan and Execute components have access to a runtime model of the system and environment which is kept in the Knowledge component. In order to provide guarantees on the correctness of a self-adaptive system at runtime, the MAPE-K feedback loop needs to be extended with assurance techniques. To address this issue, we propose a coordinated actor-based approach to build a reusable and scalable model@runtime for self-adaptive systems in the... 

We overview the main results in Compressed Sensing and Social Networks, and discuss the impact they have on Cyber Physical Social Systems (CPSS), which are currently emerging on top of the Internet of Things. Moreover, inspired by randomized Gossip Protocols, we introduce TopGossip, a new compressed-sensing algorithm for the prediction of the top-k most influential nodes in a social network. TopGossip is able to make this prediction by sampling only a relatively small portion of the social network, and without having any prior knowledge of the network structure itself, except for its set of nodes. Our experimental results on three well-known benchmarks, Facebook, Twitter, and Barabási,...