Sharif Digital Repository

One of the major aims of privatization is increasing the productivity by transferring ownership to private sector. We would like to estimate this effect in selected state –owned firms. Analysis the productivity effect of privatization of Iranian firms that were initially state-owned will show the requirement of needy policies in management field of privatization to ratify and run the privatization policy faster base on academic estimate. We analyze the productivity effect of privatization using time series and cross search data (panel data) for 21 selected initially state-owned firms that are privatized in different industry with several observations pre and post privatization. Our goal is... 

The primary objective of this thesis is to provide solutions addressing some security loopholes in continuous variables quantum key distribution protocols. The coherent detection method is utilized in this particular quantum key distribution scheme, which is a phase-sensitive detection. To measure in the quantum noise limit in the detection part, we need a local optical oscillator, which must possess a high intensity and a consistent phase correlation with the quantum signal. Therefore, reconstructing the emitter’s reference phase in the receiver’s detection system is considered as one of the most critical challenges in these protocols. In order to attain this goal, in the early versions of... 

In this thesis, we introduce a novel Artificial Intelligence (AI) system inspired by the philosophical and psychoanalytical concept of imagination as a ``Re-construction of Experiences". Our AI system is equipped with an imagination-inspired module that bridges the gap between textual inputs and other modalities, enriching the derived information based on previously learned experiences. A unique feature of our system is its ability to formulate independent perceptions of inputs. This leads to unique interpretations of a concept that may differ from human interpretations but are equally valid, a phenomenon we term as ``Interpretable Misunderstanding". We employ large-scale models,... 

According to today’s medicine progress, the need for improving the medical facilities have been increased. Within the human body, the biomolecules concentration gradient is regulating the cell functions. Biological processes such as immune response, wound healing, and cancer metastasis have been affected by the bimolecular concentration gradient. So understanding the cell behavior in the presence of a chemical gradient can improve the understanding from these biological processes, and also would help in medical researches. On the other hand, finding the appropriate dose of the drugs and in some cases finding the most effective drug is a clinical challenge that made a new field of research in... 

The development of clean, renewable and alternative sources of fossil fuels has increased in recent years due to various factors such as environmental pollution, reduced fossil fuel resources and increased energy consumption. The application of microbial fuel cells is one of the clean energy production methods using renewable sources such as municipal sewage. The microbial fuel cell converts the chemical energy stored in organic materials into electrical energy and simultaneously purifies the sewage. Increasing current density and power density are the most important challenges for microbial fuel cells. In this study, the two biocatalysts of Shewanella Oneidensis MR1 and Escherichia coli... 

During fuel combustion, aromatic sulfur compounds in energy fuels convert into sulfur oxides, which cause major environmental problems such as acidic rain, global warming, and air pollution. Absorption desulfurization is one of the promising and economical methods to remove these sulfur compounds from fuels. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a class of nanoporous materials that are of interest for use as adsorbents due to their high specific surface area, unique surface adsorption properties, high adsorption capacity, tunable porosity, flexible dynamic behavior, and diversity in functional and metal groups. In this research, we first synthesized five metal-organic frameworks, namely... 

This research deals with a realistic cyclic three-stage supply chin consisting of one supplier, one manufacturer and one or more retailers, in FMCG environment. Orders from retailers are supposed to iterate over cycles and parallel machines are available to process perishable jobs with given release dates, due dates and deadlines. To start process of he jobs, perishable raw material, supplied by an external supplier, is required. Jobs are subject to post-production shelf life limitation and must be delivered to retailers during the corresponding time window bounded by due dates and deadlines. Both early and tardy jobs are penalized by partial weighted earliness/tardiness functions and the... 

Mathematical modeling and computer simulation are powerful tools to help cancer research because they provide a good insight of cancer progression and an efficient framework to test biological hypothesis. Most of the previous studies ignored many intracellular communication between tumor cells. Gap junction is one of the interaction ways between tumor cells which plays a crucial role in cancer progression. In the first phase of this thesis, a model of intracellular communication through gap junction using evolutionary game theory scoring is proposed. In the second phase of this thesis, cancer is modeled by Markov decision process (MDP). Given that considering nutrient level constant is one... 

One of the most common devices for terahertz (THz) wave generation and detection is a Terahertz photoconductive antenna. Impedance matching between the antenna and the photoconductive material is a primary factor to obtain high optical-THz conversion efficiency. Because of the time dependant conductivity of the photoconductive material, impedance mismatching is an obstacle for generating high power THz pulses. Moreover, the range of laser power (when using Ti:Sapphire) from the excitation source varies from a few tens of milliwatts to a few watts while the radiated THz power as compared to this laser pump power is very low (in the order of a few μW); this means a low power conversion... 

In recent years, game theory passed from areas of economics and socials to other fields such as computational biology and bioinformatics. Several evolutionary games and cooperative games have been defined to predict the behavior of nonrational agents in interaction situations arising from computational biology.One of the these main applications is using Shapley value. Shapley value allocates a fair value to each player, in games that each coalition has a profit.But in many cases the computation of Shapley value is #P-complete. Thus,the goal is to optimally find Shapley value or to approximate it in each game.Another option is Banzhaf index.One of the essential games on genes is Pathway game.... 

Haptic Interfaces have been used as cooperative systems to reproduce and simulate human actions. The Haptic Interface (HI) can be used as a tool capable of interacting dynamically with the operator using haptic technology. By controlling the haptic interface and constraining it to move through the desired trajectory which is required for most of the training systems such as Hand Writing Learning System, Minimally Invasive Surgical Simulation, virtual welding training and gaming applications the users can easily interact with virtual environment through the sense of touch. Haptic device application in virtual handwriting training was investigated in this thesis. Two different modes of... 

The basis of this research is the use of millimeter wave frequency band, due to its unique features for standoff imaging. The millimeter wave standoff system used in this thesis faces challenges such as sensitivity to change of angle, separation of the object from the background and the inability of the system to accurately detect the edges of the object, that the purpose of defining this project is to provide solutions and their feasibility with imaging system to minimize these challenges. For this purpose, first the imaging process of the system is generally simulated by two methods of physical optics/physical theory of diffraction and equivalence method and then for different conditions... 

Edit distance or Levenshtein distance is one of the most fundamental problems in computer science and engineering to measure the dissimilarity between strings.This problem is solvable in O(n^2) time using dynamic programming and in 2015 it was conditionally proven that no truly subquadratic time algorithm (\textit{i.e.}, O(n^{2-ε})) exists for edit distance.Since 2001, approximating edit distance within a constant factor was recognized as one of the biggest unsolved problems in the field of combinatorial pattern matching.This thesis designs seven approximation algorithms for edit distance and its related problems.Firstly, two quantum approximation algorithms are designed with constant...