Sharif Digital Repository

Nowadays, we are facing epidemic spreading in many different areas; examples are infection propagation, rumor spreading and computer viruses in computer networks. Finding a strategy to control and mitigate the spread of these epidemics is gaining much interest in recent researches. Due to limitation of immunization resources, it is important to establish a strategy for selecting nodes which has the most effect in mitigating epidemics. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that minimizes the worst expected growth of an epidemic by reducing the size of the largest connected component of the underlying contact network. The proposed algorithm is applicable to any level of available resources... 

Identifying and measuring the impact and value of scientific output plays an important role in today's world of information overload. On one side, governments are trying to distribute research funds in ways that support research in strategically important fields, on the other side, researchers and scientists are seeking to access only relevant and quality information that have mainly worthy of their attention. Nowadays, countries are evaluated not only by their national products, military power, geographical area, etc., but also by such factors as the production and consumption of scientific information. Scientometric approaches are used to provide appropriate tools for evaluating scientific... 

Internet banking is a tool to achieve competitive advantage and its usage has been spreading rapidly in recent years. This paper strives to identify a comprehensive study of the major internet banking quality measurements, which covers a wide range of literature relevant to international papers and scholars and then evaluate them through using a precise method, Shannon entropy. At the last stage the validated criteria were exploited to survey in Iranian banks. The empirical research consists of a quantitative study of internet banking by a sample of employees in two banks of Iran. In this regard, the raised question is about whether or not the internet banking is a strategic information... 

One of the key factors in the assembly of nanoparticles and controlled construction of such systems is their positioning by a manipulation system. The response of clusters that are subjected to this process is of great importance. In this study, the behaviour of metallic nanoparticles during the manipulation process on an Au substrate is investigated using molecular dynamics. Two criteria are proposed for the evaluation of success in a pushing process regarding the intactness of a nanoparticle/substrate pair. The effects of cluster material, temperature and manipulation speed on the success of the process are investigated based on the simulation results  

This study presents a new ray tracing acceleration technique for site-specific propagation modelling in indoor environments. It overcomes one of the major problems regarding the computational efficiency of shooting-and-bouncing-ray (SBR) method, that is most of the rays emitted from the source do not reach the receiver whereas all of them must be traced. Our proposed method solves this problem in a two-step procedure based on the idea of line search theory. In the first step, called the bracketing phase, the solid angles around the transmitter that transport electromagnetic power to the receiver are determined. In the second step, called the sectioning or zoom phase, the accuracy is improved... 

Matching theory is a powerful tool to study the formation of dynamic and mutually beneficial relations among different types of rational and selfish agents. It has been widely used to develop high performance, low complexity, and decentralized protocols. In this article, a comprehensive survey of matching theory, its variants, and their significant properties appropriate for the demands of wireless communications and network engineers is provided. Recent research progress in applying matching theory to wireless communications to address major technical opportunities and challenges is presented. A novel classification of matching models from the practical perspective is provided, and the... 

Human bodies use the electrical currents to make the muscles move. Disconnection of the electrical signals between the brain and the muscles as a result of spinal cord injuries, causes paralysis below the level of injury. Functional electrical stimulation (FES) is used to stimulate the peripheral nerves of the disabled limbs. The level of these electrical signals should be selected so that the desired tasks are done successfully. Applying the appropriate controller which can result a human like behaviour and the accomplishment of the desired tasks has become a significant research area. In this paper, the multi-input multi-output (MIMO) musculoskeletal model of human arm with six muscles is... 

Because of its unique properties, graphene has attracted the attentions of many academic research groups and recently, the industry. One of the promising applications of the graphene is in micro/nano-sensors, e.g. using it as a pressure sensor. To use it in mechanical-based nano-sensors, it is very important to investigate the mechanical behavior of the nano-sized graphene sheet and its sensitivity to the medium changes applied on its faces. In this work, we use the molecular dynamics MD method and simulate the behavior of graphene sheet under differential water pressure influences. In this regard, a square straight monolayer graphene sheet is placed as a separator diaphragm between two... 

Side weirs are widely used for level control and flow regulation in hydraulic engineering applications such as irrigation, land drainage, and sewer systems. These hydraulic structures allow a part of the flow to spill laterally when the surface of the flow in the main channel rises above the weir crest. The supercritical flow over a side-weir is a typical case of spatially varied flow with decreasing discharge. This study is aimed at investigating the variations of specific energy along the side-weir using experimental results. Some diagrams have been presented in terms of dimensionless ratio of diverted discharge to total discharge. These diagrams which can be used in the design of side... 

Labyrinth side weir is one type of weirs, which can be used when the length of opening is limited. One of the advantages of labyrinth side weir is to increase the effective length of weir perpendicular to the flow and, therefore, diverting more discharge with the same flow depth and weir geometry (opening and height). Discharge coefficient should be determined to investigate the weir performance and estimate the discharge passing over the weir. In this paper, hydraulic performance of labyrinth side weir with asymmetric geometry has been experimentally studied. The change to the geometry of ordinary labyrinth side weirs causes an increase in the effectiveness of the length of weir as being... 

This paper reviews the research results, characteristics, modeling and recent developments of smart materials specially shape memory alloys and smart composites. This field even involves smart fluids and it opens a new era to find new smart materials for eliminating their flaws by combination with other advanced materials. The purpose of this paper is showing the current research coordinate. These issues help to have a technological reference for these materials. At the end, there is specific attention to Nitinols and by experiments is shown that Oliver-Pharr formulation does not cover these material behaviors. These experiments cover some important aspects of Nitinols which have not been... 

In recent years, development of high-performance supercapacitor electrode materials has stimulated a great deal of scientific research. The electrochemical performance of a supercapacitor strongly depends on its material structures. Herein, we report a simple strategy for high-performance supercapacitors by building pseudocapacitive CuS nanospheres with nanoporous structures, nanosized walls (<10 nm) and relatively large specific surface area of 65 m2/g. This electrode demonstrates excellent electrochemical performance including a maximum specific capacitance of 814 F/g at 1 A/g, significant rate capability of 42% capacitance retention at an ultrafast rate of 50 A/g, and outstanding... 

We study (2+1)-dimensional single step model for crystal growth including both deposition and evaporation processes parametrized by a single control parameter p. Using extensive numerical simulations with a relatively high statistics, we estimate various interface exponents such as roughness, growth and dynamic exponents as well as various geometric and distribution exponents of height clusters and their boundaries (or iso-height lines) as function of p. We find that, in contrary to the general belief, there exists a critical value at which the model undergoes a roughening transition from a rough phase with in the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality to a smooth phase with , asymptotically in... 

In real world social networks, there are multiple cascades which are rarely independent. They usually compete or cooperate with each other. Motivated by the reinforcement theory in sociology we leverage the fact that adoption of a user to any behavior is modeled by the aggregation of behaviors of its neighbors. We use a multidimensional marked Hawkes process to model users product adoption and consequently spread of cascades in social networks. The resulting inference problem is proved to be convex and is solved in parallel by using the barrier method. The advantage of the proposed model is twofold; it models correlated cascades and also learns the latent diffusion network. Experimental... 

Renewable energies as a solution for environmental issues have always been a key research area due to Demand Response Programs (DRPs). However, the intermittent nature of such energies may cause economic and technological challenges for Independent System Operators (ISOs) besides DRPs, since the acceptable effective solution may exceed the requirement of further investigations. Although, previous studies emphasized employing Demand Response and Renewable Energies in power systems, each problem was investigated independently, and there have been few studies which have investigated these problems simultaneously. In these recent studies, authors neither analyzed these problems simultaneously... 

Microservices architectures are becoming the defacto standard for building continuously deployed systems. At the same time, there is a substantial growth in the demand for migrating on-premise legacy applications to the cloud. In this context, organizations tend to migrate their traditional architectures into cloud-native architectures using microservices. This article reports a set of migration and rearchitecting design patterns that we have empirically identified and collected from industrial-scale software migration projects. These migration patterns can help information technology organizations plan their migration projects toward microservices more efficiently and effectively. In... 

We present an experimental investigation of stochastic switching of a bistable Josephson junction array resonator with a resonance frequency in the GHz range. As the device is in the regime where the anharmonicity is on the order of the linewidth, the bistability appears for a pump strength of only a few photons. We measure the dynamics of the bistability by continuously observing the jumps between the two metastable states, which occur with a rate ranging from a few Hz down to a few mHz. The switching rate strongly depends on the pump strength, readout strength and the temperature, following Kramers' theory. The interplay between nonlinearity and coupling, in this little explored regime,... 

The normalization theory in relational database design is a classical subject investigated in different papers. The results of these research works are the stronger normal forms such as 5NF, DKNF and 6NF. In these normal forms, there are less anomalies and redundancies, but it does not mean that these stronger normal forms are free of anomalies and redundancies. Each normal form discussion is based on a particular constraint. In this paper, we introduce relations which contain a new kind of constraint called "combinational constraint". We. distinguish two important kinds of this constraints, namely Strong and Weak. Also we classify the. Combinationally Constrained Relations as Single and... 

Graphitization in steels is a subject which has been studied temporarily in past decades. The importance of this phenomenon is due to the fact that graphite formation in steels can ease machining treatment and increase cold-work capability of steels. Weight reduction of the parts and the dedicated bioenvironmental properties of these steels are considered as a valuable replacement for lead containing steels for researchers. Anyway there has been always the assumption that this operation is long and not economically cost effective. For this reason due to the different conditions of applied heat treatments, the effects of the temperature and the time period of heat treatment on the... 

This work presents a behavioral model for non-ideal effects in a novel Hybrid time-interleaved digital to analog converter (TIDAC). In Hybrid DACs, both ΔΣ and Nyquist structures are used. In this work, in the Nyquist path, the 2-time-interleaving technique is used and in the ΔΣ path, a new structure is proposed to reduce the critical path in the TI delta-sigma modulator (DSM). In conventional TIDSM, adding each channel to the structure leads to increasing the critical path as one full-adder. This, in turn, decreases the speed of modulator since a single feedback loop is utilized to compute the running sum of the input signals. In this work, a new type of poly-phase decomposition is...