Sharif Digital Repository

Infills are as important members in structural design as beams, columns and braces. They have significant effect on structural behavior. Because of lots of variables in infills like material non-linear behavior, the interaction between frames and infill, etc., the infills performance during an earthquake is complicated, so have led designers do not consider the effect of infills in designing the structure. However, the experimental studies revealed that the infills have the remarkable effect on structure behavior. As if these effects ignored, it might occur soft-story phenomena, torsion or short-column effects on the structures. One simple and appropriate method for considering the infills... 

Bi2O3 compositions were prepared to investigate the effect of rare earth metal oxides as co-dopants on phase stability of bismuth oxide. Compositions containing 9-14 mol% of Y2O3 and Er2O3 were synthesized by solid state reaction. The structural characterization was carried out using X-ray powder diffraction. The XRD results show that the samples containing 12 and 14 mol% total dopants had cubic structure, whereas the samples with lower dopant concentrations were tetragonal. Comparing the lattice parameters of the cubic phases of (Bi 2O3)0.88(Y2O3) 0.06(Er2O3)0.06 and (Bi 2O3)0.86(Y2O3) 0.07(Er2O3)0.07 revealed that lattice parameter decreases by increasing the dopant concentration. The XRD... 

Conventional polygraphy has several alternatives and one of them is P300-based guilty knowledge test. The purpose of this paper is to apply a new method called empirical mode decomposition (EMD) to extract features from electroencephalogram (EEG) signal. EMD is an appropriate tool to deal with the nonlinear and nonstationary nature of EEG. In the previous studies on the same data set, some morphological, frequency, and wavelet features were extracted only from Pz channel, and used for the detection of guilty and innocent subjects. In this paper, an EMD-based feature extraction was done on EEG recorded signal. Features were extracted from all three recorded channels (Pz, Cz, and Fz) for... 

Soft-errors are increasingly considered as a major cause for computer system failures. Software techniques are used as cost-effective and flexible techniques to tolerate soft-errors but the introduced overhead is not acceptable in some safety-critical real-time systems. The identification of the program blocks and protecting only vulnerable blocks against soft-errors reduces the performance overhead. In this paper, we present a genetic algorithm to identify the vulnerable program blocks as well as the derating program blocks against soft-errors. Then, only vulnerable blocks are protected by some software-based soft-error tolerance techniques to achieve a lower performance and space overhead.... 

A potential peculiarity of software systems is that a large number of soft-errors are inherently derated (masked) at the software level. The rate of error-deration may depend on the type of algorithms and data structures used in the software. This paper investigates the effects of the underlying algorithms of programs on the rate of error-deration. Eight different benchmark programs were used in the study; each of them was implemented by four different algorithms, i.e. divide-and-conquer, dynamic, backtracking and branch-and-bound. About 10,000 errors were injected into each program in order to quantify and analyze the error-derating capabilities of different algorithm-designing- techniques.... 

This paper investigates the relation between information technology (IT) and the change of business operations. We evaluate the geographical demand of companies for customer service interactions. The structure is a separate selection model in which districts play the role of distinguished products. The approximated demand structure is used to evaluate the results of IT on customer size, place selection, and cost preserving. The results verify the higher cost vulnerability of IT-thorough companies but propose that capability to utilize cost different is highly company-specified and that the influence of geographically restricted externalities is even existent. Because the productivity of many... 

Queuing networks present as beneficial models for a category of problems emerging in modern manufacturing systems. As the optimal control problem for queuing networks in familiar to be difficult, an important topic of research during the last two decades has been the growth of difficult estimations, and the use of these estimations to control optimal controls. Flexible moderations are an important class of such estimations that have received much consideration in recent years. The central objective of this paper is to determine the utilization of flexible moderations in solving a diversity of scheduling problems. In this paper, we investigate the role of flexible moderations in solving... 

In this research, a web-based simulator is developed, which can be used for generating image sequences of moving spermatozoa cells. It can be used for assessment of multiple object tracking algorithms, especially Computer Aided Sperm Analysis (CASA) systems. The developed software has many useful parameters such as blurring images or adding noise and it also gives full control of sperm counts and types. To illustrate performance of the developed simulator, three parameters (spermatozoa population, standard deviation of Gaussian blur filter and noise intensity) have been swept and the results of three different multiple object tracking algorithms were compared as an application of this... 

The objective of this study is to calibrate Priestley-Taylor (PT) model for estimating open water evaporation from an arid region reservoir called Chahnimeh. Chahnimeh Reservoir which is situated in the Sistan area in the southeast of Iran is being affected by regional energy advection during May to October. Therefore, common models of open water evaporation estimation such as PT require calibration. PT method was calibrated for Chahnimeh Reservoir using a volume balance method. Results showed that PT coefficient, αPT, as a constant over the year varies between 2.47±0.09 and 1.20±0.03 for two different hydrologic conditions of dry and wet. It means that there is also an intra-annular... 

Virtual organization (VO) is aimed to provide inter-organizational collaborations. Constructing a VO necessitates provision of security and access control requirements which cannot be satisfied using the traditional access control models. This is basically due to special features of VOs; such as temporality, unknown users, and diverse resources. In this paper, after expressing our assumption on a framework for VOs; the concept of organizational trust and reputation is used to establish an access control model for VOs. Each member of an organization inherits its organizational reputation. Resource providers announce the behavior of their interacting users to their organization manager.... 

Male infertility is mostly related to semen and spermatozoa, and any diagnosis or treatment requires the investigation of the motility patterns of spermatozoa. The movements of spermatozoa are fast and involve collision and occlusion with each other. In order to extract the motility patterns of spermatozoa, multi-target tracking (MTT) of spermatozoa is necessary. One of the most important steps of MTT is data association, in which the newly arrived observations are used to update the previous tracks. Dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) is a powerful tool for modeling and solving various types of problems such as tracking and classification. There can also be a hybrid-DBN (HDBN), in which both... 

Biodegradable polymer/bioceramic nanocomposites are osteoconductive and can accelerate healing of bone tissue. In this research, silk fibroin (SF)/titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanocomposites were synthesized using different concentrations of TiO2 nanoparticles (0, 5, 10, 15 and 20 wt%). The SF/TiO2 nanocomposites were studied in terms of bioactivity and biocompatibility. The in vitro assessment of osteoblasts compatibility indicated that SF inclusion rendered nanocomposite biocompatible whereas presence of TiO2 nanoparticles allowed the cells to adhere and grow on nanocomposite surface and enhanced the bioactivity of the composite. © 2017, Taiwanese Society of Biomedical Engineering  

Twitter sentiment analysis, which often focuses on predicting the polarity of tweets, has attracted increasing attention over the last years, in particular with the rise of deep learning (DL). In this paper, we propose a new task: predicting the predominant sentiment among (first-order) replies to a given tweet. Therefore, we created RETwEET, a large dataset of tweets and replies manually annotated with sentiment labels. As a strong baseline, we propose a two-stage DL-based method: first, we create automatically labeled training data by applying a standard sentiment classifier to tweet replies and aggregating its predictions for each original tweet; our rationale is that individual errors... 

Modeling is one of assessing tools for better understanding of human body organs and study of diseases. One of the brain diseases is ADHD, which has been studied before, mostly by means of EEG signals. In this paper, the mean-field model, which is a model of neuron-population spiking, and the Power Spectrum of the resulting spikes have been studied by changing parameters of model. The results show that there is a meaningful relationship between firing activity of ADHD patients neuron population and the parameters of mean-field model and Power Spectrum of spikes. In addition, the effects of stimulant medications for ADHD patients on firing activity and power spectrum of firing activity of... 

A novel intelligent semi-active control system for an eleven degrees of freedom passenger car's suspension system using magnetorheological (MR) damper with neuro-fuzzy (NF) control strategy to enhance desired suspension performance is proposed. In comparison with earlier studies, an improvement in problem modeling is made. The proposed method consists of two parts: a fuzzy control strategy to establish an efficient controller to improve ride comfort and road handling (RCH) and an inverse mapping model to estimate the force needed for a semi-active damper. The fuzzy logic rules are extracted based on Sugeno inference engine. The inverse mapping model is based on an artificial neural network...