Sharif Digital Repository

With the growth of the population and the significant expansion of industries in the last century, many environmental problems have plagued developed and developing countries. One of these environmental problems is water pollution. Observing the effects of water pollution over time, sanitary and industrial wastewater treatment was proposed as a reliable solution. With technology development, wastewater treatment requirements have become stricter. The increase in energy consumption and wastewater treatment costs due to population growth and industrialization on the one hand and strict regulations, on the other hand, have forced those involved in this field to employ a variety of technical and... 

Membrane bioreactors (MBRs) which are commonly understood as the combination of membrane filtration and biological treatment using activated sludge have several advantages, but membrane fouling reduces the membrane efficiency, permeability and lifetime. An alternative is replacing a moving bed biofilm reactor (MBBR) with the activated sludge system which may reduce the effect of membrane fouling. The sludge produced in MBBRs has poor settling characteristics, therefore, their efficiency is limited by the sedimentation tank performance and they require a larger settling surface. The combination of moving bed biofilm reactors and membrane bioreactors can compensate for the drawbacks of both of... 

The main aim of this study is developing a robust QSAR model for describing and predicting the inhibitory activities of O-(2-phthalimidoethyl)-N-substituted thiocarbamates derivatives as novel HIV-1 non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase (HIV-1 NNRTIs) inhibitors. These drugs change the active site of the reverse transcriptase enzyme, and finally halter the HIV reproduction cycle. As the first step of this study, a multiple linear regression (MLR) model was built but it has no satisfied prediction ability. As a next step, the nonlinear correlation of the molecular descriptors and activities has been investigated by using artificial neural networks (ANN). In this section the effects of variable... 

Airport Traffic Control Towers (ATCTs) are among the most critical structures in an airport that are expected to keep their level of serviceability after severe strong earthquakes. Therefore analysis and design of these structures need a detailed investigation on the seismic behavior of the structure based on the structural characteristics. In this study three different existing reinforced concrete ATCTs have been investigated. As important parameters of earthquake design of structures, response modification factor (R-factor) of these towers will be determined. R-factor reduces elastic force level to design force level and contains the effect of ductility, overstrength. In Iranian seismic... 

Cloud infrastructure pricing framework is one of the challenges for many cloud economists and researchers, albeit its proper definition is one of the main requirements for business triumph. Efforts to focus on this issue have been extensively focused on a uniform market. Moreover, the models are mainly based on the cost factor and resources of cloud infrastructure, aiming to maximize revenue and profit margins for cloud service providers. Models that also consider the demand side and define criteria regarding the customer needs, preferences, and experiences are called value-based models, which provide a great competitive advantage for the providers aside from its higher profit margin and... 

Life insurance is a contract whereby the insurer becomes insured under certain conditions and for an amount known as insurance premium. Consequently, the insurer will pay the insured inheritors some given benefit as in the contract. There are different types of life insurance in the market. Other sectors of our proposed portfolio include risky and risk free investments. Household consumption is also considered as another variable in this package. This problem can be raised in both inflationary and non-inflationary states. You can also include a variable called loan. In the literature, this problem has been addressed by considering a sub-category of life insurance (Term Life Insurance)... 

Value at risk of an asset, is the asset’s expected maximum loss for a certain period of time and at a specified confidence level. Value-at-Risk can be calculated in the bank with its inter-nal method or standardized method. when a method have more violation number then bank need to keep more daily capital requirements. under the Basel 2 agreement if the violation of method more than 10 times in year, the Bank uses the standardized method.
There are trade off Between daily capital charge and violations. Therefore, existing methods for calculating the value at risk, usually lead to much daily capital charge or many violations. Studies show with combination of different methods to calculate... 

Journals and conferences in computer science are the major venue for publishing new achievement in the field. It is an expert opinion that a number of top conferences in computer science are even more important than journals. In this work we aim at studying this in terms of citation analysis. To this end, we took 100 top journals and 63 top conferences and extracted their citation graph through Scopus dataset. We then constructed the citation graph in which the nodes were the journals and conferences and the links corresponded to the citations of the papers. We used various measures to rank the nodes in the graph. The ranking methods included Prestige, PageRank, Eigenfactor, HITS and SALSA.... 

The long term evolution (LTE) standard is introduced and developed by the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). OFDM systems, in spite of having many advantages such high performance in bandwidth usage, are very sensitive to inter carrier interference (ICI) as a drawback. In order to prevent ICI, the frequency offset, mainly caused by the miss-match between oscillators' frequency and also between the sampling frequency of the transmitter and the receiver, should be estimated and compensated. Frequency synchronization is a part of the tasks of a synchronizer. In this thesis, main tasks of a synchronizer are illustrated and... 

Value-at-Risk (VaR) is the most commontool for risk management. This tool is used to measure market risk and also used as a basis in determining financial standards for international financial institutions. VaR is the maximum loss of the asset portfolio at the specified confidence level and certain time horizon. Many parametric, nonparametric and semi parametric methods have been invented for VaR estimation. Each one of these methods has its advantages and disadvantages and different methods may perform better in differnet situations.When estimating VaR, we can choose one of these methods or we can combine the VaRs estimated by different methods. There are few researches conducted on VaR... 

Complex networks science have received tremendous attention in recent years and the brain is one of the systems to which graph theoretical tools have been applied. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease affecting many of elderly population. AD changes the anatomy of the brain, which subsequently results in changes in its functions. These changes have been frequently reported in signals recorded from the brain (such as MEG, fMRI and EEG). Among these neuroimaging techniques EEG is one of the most aproprate methods for extracting functional connectivites according to high temporal resolution. In this thesis, we aimed at analyzing the properties of EEG-based functional networks... 

In the recent years, the problem of modeling a cognitive task using phase oscillators has been receiving a significant attention. In this view, single neurons are no longer elementary computational units. Rather, coherent oscillating groups of neurons are seen as nodes of networks performing cognitive tasks. From this assumption, we develop a model of stimulus-response learning and recognition. The most significant part of our work is defining learning methods for natural frequencies and coupling weights in a coupled phase oscillator network under Kuramoto conditions. In this thesis, we improved the previous models by not only emphasizing on the frequency of the oscillators but also taking... 

Value at risk (VaR) is the maximum loss of the asset portfolio at the specified confidence level and certain time horizon. This tool is used to measure market risk and also used as a basis in determining financial standards for international financial instituation. Conditional Autoregressive Value at Risk models or CAViaR models introduced by Engle and Manganelli (2004). This models calculate VaR base on quantile regession approach and show some promising performance properties.
In order to propose a more accurate model for calcutating VaR , we develop CAViaR models by incorporating them with intraday information then we calculate VaR with this kind of models and CAViaR... 

Frequency scarcity has emerged the necessity of opportunistic utilization of frequency bands, which can be realized through a cognitive radio system. During an agile communication between unlicensed users, a cognitive radio system must avoid collision with licensed users. Hence it should continuously observe the band of interest and report the presence of licensed user signals. This task is fulfilled by a vital part of a cognitive radio system, called the spectrum sensing core. Recently several techniques have been proposed for the spectrum sensing in literature. Some of them like matched filtering, cyclostationarity based detection are based on primary user signal features. However energy... 

Long Term Evolution (LTE) aims the peak data rates in excess of 300 Mb/s, which may appear to be challenging to achieve due to the existence of some blocks such as the turbo decoder. One efficient approach to achieve this throughput is by parallelizing the Log Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) algorithm in the turbo decoder. In fact, the interleaver is known to be a major challenging part of the turbo decoder due to its need to the parallel interleaved memory access. LTE uses Quadratic Permutation Polynomial (QPP) interleaver, which makes it suitable for the parallel decoding. In this thesis, first, we propose an efficient architecture for the QPP interleaver, called the Add-Compare-Select (ACS)... 

The rapid growth in the health care technology, has made the Body Area Network (BAN) as an attracting topic for research and design development. BAN devices have restrictions on their size and power consumption. Monitoring the respiratory signal is crucial in many medical applications and is normally part of a BAN system. Traditional methods for the respiration measurement are normally based on measuring the volume of air inhaled and exhaled by lungs (like a spirometer) or oxygen saturation in blood. However, these methods have numerous drawbacks including their high cost and limited accessibility. In this thesis, a novel scheme is proposed to derive the respiratory signal from the... 

This thesis addresses the problem of dynamic security assessment in power sys-tems with an emphasis on its application in restructured power systems and issues arising in its applications. The new electric utility environment has an immedi-ate consequence of emphasis on reliability and secure operation of power systems. This requires faster and more precise methods to assess the dynamic aspect of se-curity. On the other hand, this issue is becoming challenging when the determined dispatch might not be accommodated due to violation of the limits.This thesis addresses the problem of dynamic security assessment in power sys-tems with an emphasis on its application in restructured power systems...