Sharif Digital Repository

Accelerated bridge construction is recognized as an important method for bridge owners to accelerate the delivery of highway bridge projects. While the potential advantages of accelerated bridge construction are recognized, it is difficult for transportation specialists to quantify the risks and benefits of using accelerated bridge construction compared with conventional construction for specific bridge replacement or rehabilitation projects. A tool set, based on the analytic hierarchy process, is prepared for transportation specialists and decision makers to determine whether accelerated bridge construction is more effective than traditional construction for a given bridge replacement or... 

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) encourage the use of various Accelerated Bridge Construction (ABC) strategies, which can help reduce onsite construction time, minimize traffic and environmental impacts, improve work zone safety, and deliver longer lasting and more durable bridges. ABC approaches include the application of technical innovations and management techniques. The decision to use ABC must be made on a project-by-project basis as each bridge location is unique, and factors constraining each project are different. Toward this end, FHWA developed a qualitative decision making framework called... 

Sets of rosettes of stress probes have been performed on Hostun sand in a flexible boundary true triaxial apparatus. These have shown the effect of stress history on the local distortional stiffness of the sand. Histories have included isotropic compression, and deviatoric paths with increasingly complex shapes. These tests were performed and interpreted against a background of kinematic hardening and bounding surface plasticity, using stress response envelopes to reveal evolving distortional stiffness. Use of response envelopes to study volumetric stiffness appears to be less helpful but the phase transformation surfaces that can be extracted seem somewhat independent of recent stress... 

Resonant sensors based on micro- A nd nano-electro mechanical systems (M/NEMS) are ubiquitous in many sensing applications due to their outstanding performance capabilities, which are directly proportional to the quality factor (Q) of the devices. We address here a recurrent question in the field: Do dynamical techniques that modify the effective Q (namely parametric pumping and direct drive velocity feedback) affect the performance of said sensors? We develop analytical models of both cases, while remaining in the linear regime, and introduce noise in the system from two separate sources: Thermomechanical and amplifier (read-out) noise. We observe that parametric pumping enhances the... 

Transferring large models in federated learning (FL) networks is often hindered by clients' limited bandwidth. We propose $ extsf {FedAA}$ , an FL algorithm which achieves fast convergence by exploiting the regularized Anderson acceleration (AA) on the global level. First, we demonstrate that FL can benefit from acceleration methods in numerical analysis. Second, $ extsf {FedAA}$ improves the convergence rate for quadratic losses and improves the empirical performance for smooth and strongly convex objectives, compared to FedAvg, an FL algorithm using gradient descent (GD) local updates. Experimental results demonstrate that employing AA can significantly improve the performance of FedAvg,... 

We show that three distant parties, A, B, and C, having no prior entanglement can establish a shared GHZ state by mediating two particles which remain separable from each other and from all the other parties throughout the process. The success probability is 1/7. We prove this in a general framework for systematic distribution of entangled states between two and more parties with separable states in d dimensions. The proposed method may facilitate the construction of multinode quantum networks and many other processes which use multipartite entangled states  

Given two arbitrary pure states |φ〉 and |ψ〉 of qubits or higher level states, we provide arguments in favor of states of the form (1/√2)(|ψ〉|φ〉 + i|φ〉|ψ〉) instead of symmetric or anti-symmetric states, as natural candidates for optimally entangled states constructed from these states. We show that such states, firstly have on the average a high value of concurrence, secondly can be constructed by a universal unitary operator independent of the input states. We also show that these states are the only ones which can be produced with perfect fidelity, by any quantum operation designed for intertwining two pure states with a relative phase. A probabilistic method is proposed for producing any... 

We analyze a recent suggestion [New J. Phys. 4 (2002) 73], [quant-ph/0304091] on a possible relation between topological and quantum mechanical entanglements. We show that a one to one correspondence does not exist, neither between topologically linked diagrams and entangled states, nor between braid operators and quantum entanglers. We also add a new dimension to the question of entangling properties of unitary operators in general. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved  

In this research, a manufacturing facility with independent workstations to remanufacture nonconforming products is investigated. Each workstation is first modeled as an M/M/m queuing system with m being a decision variable. Then, a tri-objective integer nonlinear programming models is developed to formulate the problem. The first objective tries to minimize the waiting times of products, while the second one tries to maximize the minimum reliability of machines at the workstations. Since minimization of the waiting times results in using a large number of machines with higher idle times, the third objective is considered to minimize the mean idle time of the machines. The aim is to... 

In this paper, the performance of some popular direct interconnection networks, namely the mesh, torus and hypercube, are studied with adaptive wormhole routing for different traffic patterns. We investigate the effect of the number of virtual channels and depth of their buffers on the performance of such strictly orthogonal topologies under uniform, hot-spot and matrix-transpose traffic patterns for generated messages, while the total buffer size associated to each physical channel is kept constant. In addition we analyze the effect of escape channel buffer length on the performance of a fully adaptive routing algorithm. It is shown that the optimal number of virtual channels and buffer... 

Graphene oxide nanoribbons (GONRs) were synthesized using an oxidative unzipping of multi-walled carbon nanotubes. The interactions of the GONRs with various concentrations of fetal bovine serum or human plasma serum indicated that the GONRs were functionalized substantially by the albumin originated from the two different protein sources. Then, concentration-dependent cytotoxicity of the protein-functionalized GONRs on human epithelial cells was studied. Although the GONRs with concentrations ≤50 μg/mL did not exhibit significant cytotoxicity on the cells (with the cell viability >85%), the concentration of 100 μg/mL exhibited significant cytotoxicity including prevention of cell... 

A novel approach for mesoscale modelling of concrete composites is proposed by combining enriched scaled boundary finite element methods with quad-tree mesh. The concrete meso-structures are comprised of randomly distributed aggregates, mortar matrix, and interface transition zone. An improved random aggregate generation technique is developed to construct digital images of mesoscale concrete models. Based on the quadtree decomposition algorithm, meshes can be generated automatically from the digital images of concrete mesostructure. The whole mesh generation process is highly efficient without any artificial interference and eliminates the issue of hanging nodes faced by standard finite... 

The fabrication of supported noble metal nanocrystals (NCs) with well-controlled morphologies have been attracted considerable interests due to their merits in a wide variety of applications. Photodeposition is a facile and effective method to load metals over semiconductors in a simple slurry reactor under irradiation. By optimizing the photodeposition process, the size, chemical states, and the geometrical distribution of metal NCs have been successfully tuned. However, metal NCs with well-controlled shapes through the photodeposition process have not been reported until now. Here, we report our important advances in the controlled photodeposition process to load regular noble metal NCs.... 

This paper presents a system based on pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) for localization of networked mobile users, which relies only on sensors embedded in the devices and device- to-device connectivity. The user trajectory is reconstructed by measuring step by step the user displacements. Though step length can be estimated rather accurately, heading evaluation is extremely problematic in indoor environments. Magnetometer is typically used, however measurements are strongly perturbed. To improve the location accuracy, this paper proposes a novel cooperative system to estimate the direction of motion based on a machine learning approach for perturbation detection and filtering, combined with... 

In this paper, the parallel implementations of different iterative polynomial root finding methods on a processor with SIMD processing capability are reported. These methods are based on the construction of a sequence of approximations that converge to the set of roots. We have chosen four widely used methods namely Newton's, Durand-Kerner's, Aberth-Ehrlich's, and QD and implemented them using the SIMD instruction set of the Pentium processor with C++ and assembly language. Experiments show that a speedup of 3 or higher can be achieved, depending on the order of polynomial, required accuracy, and the method employed. © 2005 IEEE  

Chest computed tomography (CT) has played an essential diagnostic role in assessing patients with COVID-19 by showing disease-specific image features such as ground-glass opacity and consolidation. Image segmentation methods have proven to help quantify the disease and even help predict the outcome. The availability of longitudinal CT series may also result in an efficient and effective method to reliably assess the progression of COVID-19, monitor the healing process and the response to different therapeutic strategies. In this paper, we propose a new framework to identify infection at a voxel level (identification of healthy lung, consolidation, and ground-glass opacity) and visualize the... 

Additive manufacturing (AM) of biomedical materials provides enormous opportunities to fabricate multifunctional and structurally designed frameworks for tissue engineering, such as dental implants and bone substitutes. Despite several advantages of the binder jet 3D printing technology over other AM methods, for example, no limitations in materials selection, high materials recycling efficiency, no thermal stress development, no need to support materials, and the possibility of fabrication of printing functionally graded materials, the fabrication of biomedical-grade titanium alloys with high-density, fine microstructure, and low pickup of impurities is still challenging. This work presents... 

Phase detector design for clock and data recovery (CDR) becomes challenging as the number of pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) levels increases. This paper presents a bang-bang phase detector (BBPD) architecture for PAM with N-level signaling (PAM-N) that balances the complexity and performance by utilizing an edge slicer whose threshold is adjusted according to the types of transitions. To accommodate high-speed applications, one-eight-rate architecture with carefully chosen timing is exploited. The validity of the proposed BBPD is examined for its PAM-4 and PAM-6 versions in 28 nm CMOS technology. © 2023 IEEE  

Background: Evidence is needed regarding the air pollutant components and their sources responsible for associations between particle mass concentrations and human cardiovascular outcomes. We previously found associations between circulating biomarkers of inflammation and mass concentrations of quasi-ultrafine particles ≤ 0.25 μm in aerodynamic diameter (PM0.25) in a panel cohort study of 60 elderly subjects with coronary artery disease living in the Los Angeles Basin.Objectives: We reassessed biomarker associations with PM0.25 using new particle composition data.Methods: Weekly biomarkers of inflammation were plasma interleukin-6 (IL-6) and soluble tumor necrosis factor-α receptor II... 

This paper studies a remanufacturing facility with several types of incoming nonconforming products and different independent remanufacturing workstations. The workstations have limited capacities so that an outsourcing strategy can be practiced. Each workstation is modeled with an M/M/1/k queuing system considering k as a decision variable. Additionally, a binary decision variable is taken into account to determine the contracting strategy along with some decision variables for the prices of remanufactured products. Thus, a bi-objective mixed-integer nonlinear programming is built to obtain optimal values of the decision variables. The first objective attempts to maximize the total profit...