Sharif Digital Repository

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... 

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... 

Extraction of fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) from the abdominal region of the mother’s skin is challenge task due to the high overlapping of maternal and fetal signals in this area. To overcome the problem, this paper proposes the utilization of extreme learning model (ELM) as the prediction algorithm to train on the FECG signal extracted by least mean square approach from the input abdominal and thoracic signals. The trained ELM model is used to model the FECG signal for the testing samples. Also, this paper investigates the firefly algorithm (FA) to tune the parameters of ELM and improve its performance. Due to the high complexity and too many parameters of FA, this paper embeds the... 

Secure operation of protective intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) has been recognized as a crucial issue for power grids. By gaining access to substation IEDs, intruders can severely disrupt the operation of protection systems. This paper develops an analytical reliability assessment framework for quantifying the impacts of the hypothesized integrity attacks against protection systems. Petri net models are used to simulate possible intrusion scenarios into substation networks. The cyber network model is constructed from firewall, intrusion prevention system (IPS), and password models, which are three types of defense mechanisms for protecting substation networks. In this paper, two main... 

This study presented a qualitative and quantitative project risk assessment using a hybrid PMBOK model developed under uncertainty conditions. Accordingly, an exploratory and applied research design was employed in this study. The research sample included 15 experienced staff working in main and related positions in Neyr Perse Company. After reviewing the literature and the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), 32 risk factors were identified and their number reduced to 17 risks using the expert opinions via the fuzzy Delphi technique run through three stages. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis showed that all risks were confirmed by the members of the research sample.... 

In this paper, a novel method for capturing the information of a powerful and trained deep convolutional neural network and distilling it into a training smaller network is proposed. This is the first time that a saliency map method is employed to extract useful knowledge from a convolutional neural network for distillation. This method, despite of many others which work on final layers, can successfully extract suitable information for distillation from intermediate layers of a network by making class specific attention maps and then forcing the student network to mimic producing those attentions. This novel knowledge distillation training is implemented using state-of-the-art DeepLab and... 

The rapid development of scientific fields in this modern era has raised the concern for prospective scholars to find a proper research field to conduct their future studies. Thus, having a vision of future could be helpful to pick the right path for doing research and ensuring that it is worth investing in. In this study, we use article keywords of computer science journals and conferences, assigned by INSPEC controlled indexing, to construct a temporal scientific knowledge network. By observing keyword networks snapshots over time, we can utilize the link prediction methods to foresee the future structures of these networks. We use two different approaches for this link prediction problem.... 

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to use correlation analysis to understand how knowledge structure, task structure and collaboration affect collective knowledge (CK) by the mediating mechanism of communication. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on an existing gap in the literature related to CK, a research model with five hypotheses is proposed. The hypotheses were analyzed based on data collected from 114 work-team practitioners using structural equation modeling. Findings: The results indicate that communication, knowledge structure, task structure and collaboration significantly contribute to CK and that communication partially mediates the impact of these constructs on CK.... 

Limited access to energy resources and increasing demand for mitigation of the environmental impacts have necessitated higher production efficiencies. Therefore, the promotion of R&D activities has been one of the main parts of national energy policies. In this research work, two methods are used for assessing the effectiveness of the R&D capital on resource conservation. First, by developing the resource-included knowledge production function of the energy sector and second, through direct assessment of the functionality of resource productivity from R&D capital. Based on official data provided by national statistical centers, a comparative analysis has been conducted to examine the... 

In order to improve the communications inside and outside the enterprise, efficient utilization of enterprise capitals and make improvements in the services and products of enterprise, many enterprises have turned to use enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. On the other hand, the more the role of knowledge assets in enterprises grows, the higher the position of knowledge management (KM) in the enterprises becomes and it gradually becomes fundamental to success. The role of knowledge management in today’s knowledge-based world has attracted considerable attention to this topic in industry and academia. The use of ERP and knowledge management in enterprises for the continuation of... 

Considering the problem of funding start-ups because of their nature, some entrepreneurs developed crowdfunding in which funding is done via social network. Crowdfunding is a complicated and dynamic phenomenon. In addition, studies conducted on crowdfunding are not significant in number and they have been conducted in exploratory and partial manner. As a result, it is necessary to adopt an approach capable of understanding complex dynamic phenomena so as to be able to explain a crowdfunding. The present paper designs a system dynamics model of crowdfunding for support of new Iranian knowledge-based IT startups so as to highlight the complexities and dynamics of crowdfunding. The results of... 

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... 

Software development nowadays is heavily based on libraries, frameworks and their proposed Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). However, due to challenges such as the complexity and the lack of documentation, these APIs may introduce various obstacles for developers and common defects in software systems. To resolve these issues, developers usually utilize Question and Answer (Q&A) websites such as Stack Overflow by asking their questions and finding proper solutions for their problems on APIs. Therefore, these websites have become inevitable sources of knowledge for developers, which is also known as the crowd knowledge. However, the relation of this knowledge to the software quality...