Sharif Digital Repository

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.... 

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... 

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... 

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.... 

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... 

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... 

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... 

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.... 

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... 

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... 

Local educational institutions produce in-house English for Specific Purpose (ESP) materials according to the curriculum policies designated and developed by the Ministry of Higher Education In Iran. To this end, this book aims to be used in the Iranian setting at the tertiary level for undergraduate students majoring in Mechanical Engineering. Moreover, the style of English usage in this ESP textbook is American.
Regarding the content of the textbook, it has both thematic organizations in which the topics are relevant and includes sufficient treatment of the target language areas necessary for the students. The principle organizing approach of this textbook is theme-based. In addition,... 

The aim of this study is to employ feedback control loops to provide a stable forward dynamics simulation of human movement under repeated position constraint conditions in the environment, particularly during stair climbing. A ten-degrees-of-freedom skeletal model containing 18 Hill-type musculotendon actuators per leg was employed to simulate the model in the sagittal plane. The postural tracking and obstacle avoidance were provided by the proportional—integral—derivative controller according to the modulation of the time rate change of the joint kinematics. The stability of the model was maintained by controlling the velocity of the body's centre of mass according to the desired centre of...