Sharif Digital Repository

In recent years, in order to investigate the structural performance in seismic zones, concrete column reinforcement and observing their behavior under cyclic loading have attracted considerable attentions. The ductility and energy absorption capability of structure play an important role in structural performance against earthquake and consequently its failure patterns. A new chapter of these investigations has begun by the reinforcement of the concrete members, a major part of which is concerned with the confinement of concrete members in order to increase their ductility and energy absorption against the forces induced by earthquake. In this study, three prominent methods of concrete... 

Through the bromination reaction of anthracene, the compound 9,10-dibromoanthracene (1) was synthesized. Subsequently, using a Suzuki coupling mechanism and the pinacol ester of 4-pyridineboronic acid, the ligand 9,10-bis(4-pyridyl)anthracene (2) was obtained. A cubic molecular cage [(PtMe3)8(9,10-bis(4-pyridyl)anthracene)12][OTf]8 (5) with trimethylplatinum(IV) (PtMe3) vertices and anthracene-based linkers was synthesized from the reaction of [PtMe3I]4 (3) with 9,10-bis (4-pyridyl)anthracene(2) linker in the presence of AgOTF (OTf = trifluoromethanesulfonate) in a 1:6 molar ratio. The structure of 5 was characterized by NMR spectroscopy in solution state. The ratio of aromatic to aliphatic... 

Determining a promotion planning is a critical decision for retail managers. This plan should decide on the amount and duration of promotions for each product in a way that maximizes profit compared to a non-promotion scenario. In this study, the promotion optimization problem in a retail environment is formulated as a non-linear integer programming problem. The objective function is to maximize profit from product sales during the sales period. The problem also includes several business-related constraints that limit the number of promotions. In this study, a reinforcement learning approach, specifically Deep Q-Network, has been used to solve the mathematical model. The implementation... 

Pricing and revenue management are among the most important decisions for any economic enterprise. Several factors can influence decisions in this area and change the company’s pricing strategy, including uncertainties in product demand and customer preferences. This factor becomes particularly significant when the product is newly launched. Therefore, over time, customer preferences and willingness to pay may increase through various advertisements such as customer reviews and word-of-mouth. With rising demand, the seller has the opportunity to raise prices in the next periods. However, price increases can lead to unfair pricing perceptions by customers, hence reducing their purchasing... 

One of the important factors that are effective in the continuation of businesses is their profitability. Pricing, as an important component of the business process, greatly impacts profitability. Therefore, by using a suitable pricing method, retailers and service providers can increase their profits and avoid issues such as inventory congestion, imposed discounts, or lost sales opportunities. In this research, the two-tariff pricing system in internet services is investigated and determined by taking into account the randomness of customer consumption. The problem includes a set of Internet sales plans, each plan has a fixed price for a certain amount of data and a variable price for... 

The growing demand for scalable and cost-effective computing resources has led to the widespread adoption of the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model in cloud computing. One of the pricing models for resources, or virtual machines, in this service is the Spot model, which allows customers to access unused cloud server capacity at significantly lower costs compared to other models. However, despite their affordability, these virtual machines do not come with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) and may experience interruptions during use. Such interruptions increase the time required for customers to complete their tasks. In this study, we utilize discrete-event system simulations to examine... 

Pricing plays an important and essential role in the profit and income of companies. The importance of pricing is not only related to its role in the company's profitability, but it also changes the customer's understanding and loyalty towards the company and can create the company's reputation or destroy it. Determining the right price will increase product sales and increase customer loyalty and create a competitive advantage for the company. One of the most important and influential variables in product pricing is the amount of demand. The main challenge of companies for product pricing is the uncertainty in their demand. In order to deal with this problem, data-driven pricing is used.... 

Coreference resolution is an essential step toward understanding discourses, and it is needed by many NLP tasks such as summarization, machine translation, question answering, etc. Pronoun resolution is a major and challenging subpart of coreference resolution, in which only the resolution of pronouns is considered. The existing coreference resolution approaches can be classified into two broad categories: linguistic and machine learning approaches. Linguistic approaches need a lot of linguistic information for the resolution process. Acquisition of such information is an error- prone and time-consuming process. In contrast, learning approaches need less linguistic information and provide... 

In network science, link prediction is one of the essential tasks that has been neglected. One important application of link prediction in telecommunication networks is analyzing the user's consumption pattern to provide better service. This project aims to predict future links with applications to call data using the users' call history. In previous research, there are two main approaches: 1) heuristic-based approach, and 2) deep-learning-based approach, such as graph neural networks. These methods are mainly used for processing static graphs, and therefore, we cannot generalize them to dynamic graphs. But there are many graphs which are dynamic in nature. For instance, call data records... 

In the upcoming research, with the aim of bone tissue engineering and achieving a new structure, a scaffold based on polyhema (PHEMA) and gelatin (Gel), which are biocompatible polymers for bone tissue, was made and evaluated. Also, in order to improve the bioactivity and mechanical properties, bioactive glass alone (BG45S5) or together with strontium (BG-Sr) was used in the scaffold structure. and chemical by conducting FTIR, XRD, SEM, mechanical strength, bioactivity measurement, contact angle, water absorption and degradation tests. Biological investigations were done using mesenchymal stem cells derived from human bone marrow and with the help of MTT evaluations and SEM photography. The... 

With a growing concern on the considerable energy consumed by data centers, research efforts are targeting toward green data centers with higher energy efficiency. Networks are essential to today’s highly instrumented and connected society. Currently responsible for a fraction of the energy the IT sector consumes, networks rely on equipments that often use a constant amount of power regardless of their utilization; a worsening scenario as traffic is expected to increase by a factor of three in the next few years. Datacenter networks, for instance, employ devices that consume several kilowatts of power even when idle. This work aims to improve the energy efficiency of datacenter networks by... 

Although Robot Assisted Language Learning (RALL) has recently received attention as a tool for language learning, its role in pragmatic development has gone unnoticed. Hence, this study sought to explore the effect of RALL on pragmatic learning of greeting, thanking, and request speech acts by young Persian-speaking EFL learners. To this end, 38 preschool female and male kids (3-6 years old) were assigned to the RALL (19 students) and game-based (19 students) groups. The humanoid robot for the RALL group was used as an assistant to the teacher while for the game-based group the instruction was based on gaming methods such as command, mystery bag and pass the ball games. The instructional... 

Tapering the beam along its length may lead to an increase in the voltage density of piezoelectric energy harvester. In this study, the energy harvester voltage with linear variable cross section is studied by developing an analytical method in both linear and nonlinear states. In linear mode, the results are compared with the experimental results. For the development of linear and nonlinear analytic relations, the Euler–Bernoulli beam and linear voltage variations in the thickness direction are used, and for the separation of variables, the mass normalized mode shapes has been used. The results of the linear analytical method are compared with the results of past research and experimental... 

Bubble cluster has attracted the interests of many researches since the early twentieth century. Despite its easy generation and numerous occurrences, its study is extremely complex. Describing the dynamical behavior of bubble clusters is possible when quite a few simplifying assumptions are utilized. In other words, one can observe that with current approaches, the relevant theoretical researches are not very valuable. In this research, however, lattice Boltzmann method, a rather recent mesoscopic approach, was used to study the behavior of bubbles in a bubble cluster. Of course, this is only the beginning and there is a long way before getting close to experimental results. However, there... 

Myocardial Infarction occurs due to sudden blockage in a coronary artery and causes necrosis of myocardial tissue. Since myocardium is unable to self-regenerate, cardiac tissue engineering has become a promising therapeutic approach for MI treatment by restoring heart function via combination of cells, biomaterials and signaling factors. For this purpose, myocardial extracellular matrix (ECM) is an attractive biomaterial providing better biomimetic for cultured cells. In this project, we synthesized an in situ forming hydrogel derived from myocardial ECM and for improving mechanical and electrical properties of ECM hydrogel we added oxidized alginate (OA) with 5% oxidation degree and APTMS...