Sharif Digital Repository

The first spoken dialogue system is developed for the Persian language is introduced. This is a ticket reservation system with Persian ASR and NLU modules. The focus of the paper is on learning the dialogue management module. In this work, real on-line training data are used during the learning process. For on-line learning, the effect of the variations of discount factor (γ) on the learning speed is investigated as the second contribution of the research. The optimal values for γ were found and the variation pattern of the action-value function (Q) in the learning process was obtained. A probabilistic policy for selecting actions is used in this work for the first time instead of greedy... 

In this paper we claim that local optimization can produce proper start point for genetic search. We completely test this claim on partitioning problem and on the performance of genetic search in a real problem that is finding aggregation tree in the sensor networks. The presented method (named Tendency algorithm) increases the performance of heuristic searches, and can be used in parallel with other tuning methods. The paper justifies the logic behind tendency algorithm by measuring the "entropy" of solution (in regard to optimal solution), and by numerous empirical tests. © 2008 IEEE  

Context Event-Driven Software (EDS) is a class of software whose behavior is driven by incoming events. Web and desktop applications that respond to user-initiated events on their Graphical User Interface (GUI), or embedded software responding to events and signals received from the equipment in its operating environment are examples of EDS. Testing EDS poses great challenges to software testers. One of these challenges is the need to generate a huge number of possible event sequences that could sufficiently cover the EDS's state space. Objective In this paper, we introduce a new six-stage testing procedure for event-driven web applications to overcome EDS testing challenges. Method The... 

Due to a rapid development of process manufacturing, composite materials with graphene-reinforcement have obtained so much commercially notices in the promoted engineering applications. With this regard, the critical voltage and frequency characteristics of a graphene nanoplatelets (GNP) composite cylindrical nanoshell coupled with the piezoelectric actuator (PIAC) are investigated. The material properties of piece-wise graphene-reinforced composites (GNPRCs) are assumed to be graded through the thickness direction of a cylindrical nanoshell and are estimated based on a nanomechanical model. For the first time, the current study is considering the effects of the piezoelectric layer, GNPRC... 

In this article, the vibration characteristics of high-speed rotating graphene-nanoplatelets (GNP)-reinforced composite cylindrical nanoshell coupled with a piezoelectric actuator (PIAC) are investigated. This composite nanostructure rotates around the axial direction, and the Coriolis and centrifugal effects are considered in the formulation. The material properties of piecewise graphene-reinforced composites (GNPRCs) are assumed to be graded in the thickness direction of the cylindrical nanoshell and estimated through a nanomechanical model. In the current study, the effects of angular velocity, piezoelectric layer, GNPRC and size-effects on the frequency of the spinning GNPRC cylindrical... 

The article Wave propagation characteristics of the electrically GNP reinforced nanocomposite cylindrical shell, written by Hamed Safarpour, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on 12/04/2019 with open access. With the author(s)’ decision to step back from Open Choice, the copyright of the article changed on [07/05/2019] to © The Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering 2019 and the article is forthwith distributed under the terms of copyright  

In this article, wave propagation characteristics of a size-dependent graphene nanoplatelet (GNP) reinforced composite cylindrical nanoshell coupled with piezoelectric actuator (PIAC) and surrounded with viscoelastic foundation is presented. The effects of small scale are analyzed based on nonlocal strain gradient theory (NSGT) which is an accurate theory employing exact length scale parameter and nonlocal constant. The governing equations of the GNP composite cylindrical nanoshell coupled with PIAC have been evolved using Hamilton’s principle and solved with assistance of the analytical method. For the first time in the current study, wave propagation electrical behavior of a GNP composite... 

In this research, buckling and vibrational characteristics of a spinning cylindrical moderately thick shell covered with piezoelectric actuator carrying spring-mass systems are performed. This structure rotates about axial direction and the formulations include the Coriolis and centrifugal effects. In addition, various cases of thermal (uniform, linear, and nonlinear) distributions are studied. The modeled cylindrical moderately thick shell covered with piezoelectric actuator, its equations of motion, and boundary conditions are derived by the Hamilton's principle and based on a moderately cylindrical thick shell theory. For the first time in the present study, attached mass-spring systems... 

In this research, electrically performance, vibration/resonance characteristics, low-velocity impact, and absorbed energy of the piezoelectric doubly curved panel on the viscoelastic substrate is carried out. For modeling the contact force between the structure and impactor, Hertz contact theory is presented. Hamilton's principle and first-order shear deformation theory (FSDT) are presented for obtaining the governing and boundary condition equations of the structure under the low-velocity impact. Galerkin and Newmark solution procedures are presented for solving the governing equation in displacement, and time domains, respectively. This study's novelty is considering the effect of... 

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a software design framework where distributed services are provided and used by applications over a network. By using this architecture new challenges appeared for software testing. Lack of access to the source code and runtime binding are examples of these challenges. Functional testing of services assures the quality of service-oriented applications. In this paper, we introduce a new 3-phase consumer and provider contract-based process for web service testing to overcome SOA testing challenges. Our proposed process, namely OTaaWS, consists of Test Automation, Test Execution and Test Management steps on the provider's side, which can be done on-demand.... 

This paper aims at investigating the seismic behavior of strengthened reinforced concrete (RC) shear walls using a 3D finite element analysis. A series of four different configurations of carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites and four different schemes of steel elements are utilized to compare the two methods of retrofitting RC shear walls with similar dimensions and reinforcement ratios. Nonlinear simulations of the RC shear walls are conducted under the action of lateral cyclic loading in ABAQUS Explicit software. In addition, the numerical modeling for RC walls strengthened by CFRP composites as well as steel elements are validated according to the previous experimental... 

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a technology for designing software systems. By using this architecture, new challenges appeared for software testing. Functional testing of services assures the quality of service-oriented applications. Herein, we introduce a new test web service named TaaWS (Test as a Web Service), which is a combination of both online testing and testing as a service to overcome SOA testing challenges. Each web service can have its test web service. Thus, the consumer can call TaaWS to assure the accuracy of the web services used in the application. TaaWS consists of semantic and structural test cases extracted from the extended-attribute grammar of the web service... 

Service-Oriented Architecture is a technology for designing software systems. Upon using this architecture, new challenges appeared for software testing in which unit testing can be viewed as the most essential and basic testing procedure. Many industrial tools and academic studies have presented a level of automation for unit testing of web services. Herein, we introduce a new tool called Sharif-TaaWS to automate the unit testing of web services through a method-based attribute grammar (MBAG) of the source code. This tool generates a test web service named TaaWS (Test as a web service), a combination of both online testing and testing as a service. Sharif-TaaWS has three modules including... 

Recently, there has been a growing attention in frequent itemset mining in distributed systems. In this paper, we present an algorithm to extract frequent itemsets from large distributed datasets. Our algorithm uses gossip as the communication mechanism and does not rely on any central node. In gossip based communication, nodes repeatedly select other random nodes in the system, and exchange information with them. Our algorithm proceeds in rounds and provides all nodes with the required support counts of itemsets, such that each node is able to extract the global frequent itemsets. For local iteration and generation of candidate itemsets, a trie data structure is used, which facilitates the... 

Microbial desalination cell (MDC) is a new bio-electrochemical technique which converts chemical energy into electrical energy, and at the same time desalinates water and treats wastewater. In this study, MDC performance and water biofouling conditions were tested as an efficient pretreatment desalination process of reverse osmosis (RO). The experiments were designed in a three-chamber reactor to compare the performance of batch and continuous fed modes, using bio-cathode and synthetic wastewater in four different hydraulic retention times and 17 and 35 g/L NaCl concentrations. According to the results, maximum salt removal of about 52.3% was obtained in the continuously fed MDC at 35 g/L... 

We present an ontology based indexing method for unstructured P2P networks. We maintain limited size indexes at each node to identify number of documents accessible on each concept without loosing any indexing information. Out method supports complex queries, combined of conjunction and disjunction phrases. We simulate our search algorithm on an unstructured P2P network and show that our method significantly reduces the network traffic. © 2008 Springer-Verlag  

Networks-on-Chip (NoCs for short) are known as the most scalable and reliable on-chip communication architectures for multi-core SoCs with tens to hundreds IP cores. Proper mapping the IP cores on NoC tiles (or assigning threads to cores in chip multiprocessors) can reduce end-to-end delay and energy consumption. While almost all previous works on mapping consider higher priority for the application's flows with higher required bandwidth, a mapping strategy, presented in this paper, is introduced that considers multicast communication flows in addition to the normal unicast flows. To this end, multicast and unicast traffic flows are first characterized in terms of some new metrics which are... 

The capability of fuzzy systems to solve different kinds of problems has been demonstrated in several previous investigations. Genetic fuzzy systems (GFSs) hybridize the approximate reasoning method of fuzzy systems with the learning capability of evolutionary algorithms. The objective of this paper is to design and analysis of various kinds of genetic fuzzy systems to deal with intrusion detection problem as a new real-world application area which is not previously tackled with GFSs. The resulted intrusion detection system would be capable of detecting normal and abnormal behaviors in computer networks. We have presented three kinds of genetic fuzzy systems based on Michigan, Pittsburgh and... 

Networks-on-Chip (NoCs for short) are known as the most scalable and reliable on-chip communication architectures for multi-core SoCs with tens to hundreds IP cores. Proper mapping the IP cores on NoC tiles (or assigning threads to cores in chip multiprocessors) can reduce end-to-end delay and energy consumption. While almost all previous works on mapping consider higher priority for the application's flows with higher required bandwidth, a mapping strategy, presented in this paper, is introduced that considers multicast communication flows in addition to the normal unicast flows. To this end, multicast and unicast traffic flows are first characterized in terms of some new metrics which are... 

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) defined a new architecture, called Home eNode B (HeNB). HeNB is able to provide new services with higher data rate in a low cost. Security is a critical aspect of HeNB. In order to have HeNB secure access to core network, 3GPP defines an authentication protocol based on IKEv2. A number of security vulnerabilities such as HeNB masquerading have not been addressed and solved by 3GPP technical specification yet. In this paper an improved HeNB authentication protocol is introduced which does not allow an attacker to connect unauthorized network users using a mask. Finally, we evaluate our protocol performance and verify it by Automated Validation of...