Sharif Digital Repository

Needs analysis is the key step to designing relevant and useful courses in English for Specific Purposes (ESP), but finding ways to deliver needs in a motivating and interesting way is also paramount. Therefore, investigating students’ motivation to learn ESP is central in needs analysis. Few studies have investigated needs from the perspective of ESP learners’ motivation. Focussing on engineering fields at three Iranian state universities, this study aimed to identify factors that affect engineering students’ motivation for learning technical English in ESP courses. Using a mixed method design, this study was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, semi-structured interviews with 40... 

Needs analysis is the key step to designing relevant and useful courses in English for Specific Purposes (ESP), but finding ways to deliver needs in a motivating and interesting way is also paramount. Therefore, investigating students’ motivation to learn ESP is central in needs analysis. Few studies have investigated needs from the perspective of ESP learners’ motivation. Focussing on engineering fields at three Iranian state universities, this study aimed to identify factors that affect engineering students’ motivation for learning technical English in ESP courses. Using a mixed method design, this study was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, semi-structured interviews with 40... 

This study examined Iranian EFL learners’ preferences regarding oral Corrective Feedback (CF) in a TOEFL speaking course. A 30-item questionnaire was administered to 32 participants in a TOEFL preparation course to elicit EFL learners’ views concerning their CF expectations. The results showed that based on the nature and objective of the course, students cared about their accuracy while fluency for these students was of secondary importance. Therefore, CF was regarded as crucial and necessary by the participants and they considered their grammatical errors as the most important one to be corrected followed by vocabulary and pronunciation errors. In terms of CF type, explicit and delayed... 

Organ ischemia with inadequate oxygen supply followed by reperfusion (which initiates a complex of inflammatory responses and oxidative stress) occurs in different clinical conditions and surgical procedures including stroke, myocardial infarction, limb ischemia, renal failure, organ transplantation, free-tissue-transfer, cardiopulmonary bypass, and vascular surgery. Even though pharmacological treatments protect against experimental ischemia reperfusion (I/R) injury, there has not been enough success in their application for patient benefits. The main hurdles in the treatment of I/R injury are the lack of diagnosis tools for understanding the complicated chains of I/R-induced signaling... 

In a nanoscopic thin film of a strong topological insulator (TI) the Coulomb interaction in the channel that exchanges the two electrons with the same chirality in two different planes of the slab takes advantage of the minus sign resulting from such "exchange" and gives rise to a bound state between the positive-energy states in one surface and the negative-energy states in the opposite surface. Therefore particle and hole pairs in the undoped Dirac cone of the TI thin film form an inter-surface spin-singlet state that lies below the continuum of free particle-hole pairs. This mode is similar to the excitons of semiconductors, albeit formed between the electron and hole pairs from two... 

The particle-hole continuum (PHC) for massive Dirac fermions provides an unprecedented opportunity for the formation of two collective split-off states, one in the singlet and the other in the triplet (spin-1) channel, when the short-range interactions are added to the undoped system. Both states are close in energy and are separated from the continuum of free particle-hole excitations by an energy scale of the order of the gap parameter Δ. They both disperse linearly with two different velocities, reminiscent of spin-charge separation in Luttinger liquids. When the strength of Hubbard interactions is stronger than a critical value, the velocity of singlet excitation, which we interpret as a... 

We present a formulation for the nonlinear optical response in gapped graphene, where the low-energy single-particle spectrum is modeled by massive Dirac theory. As a representative example of the formulation presented here, we obtain a closed form formula for the third harmonic generation in gapped graphene. It turns out that the covariant form of the low-energy theory gives rise to peculiar logarithmic singularities in the nonlinear optical spectra. The universal functional dependence of the response function on dimensionless quantities indicates that the optical nonlinearity can be largely enhanced by tuning the gap to smaller values  

Within the block spin renormalization group, we give a very simple derivation of the exact phase boundaries of the XYZ spin chain. First, we identify the Ising order along ◯ or ŷ as attractive renormalization group fixed points of the Kitaev chain. Then, in a global phase space composed of the anisotropy λ of the XY interaction and the coupling Δ of the Δσzσz interaction, we find that the above fixed points remain attractive in the two-dimesional parameter space. We therefore classify the gapped phases of the XYZ spin chain as: (1) either attracted to the Ising limit of the Kitaev-chain, which in turn is characterized by winding number ±1, depending on whether the Ising order parameter is... 

We show that the continuum limit of the tilted Dirac cone in materials such as 8-Pmmn borophene and layered organic conductor α-(BEDT-TTF)2I3 corresponds to deformation of the Minkowski space-time of Dirac materials. From its Killing vectors we construct an emergent tilted-Lorentz (t-Lorentz) symmetry group for such systems. As an example of the t-Lorentz transformations we obtain the exact solution of the Landau bands for a crossed configuration of electric and magnetic fields. For any given tilt parameter 0≤ζ<1, if the ratio χ=vFBz/Ey of the crossed magnetic and electric fields satisfies χ≥1+ζ, one can always find appropriate t-boosts in both valleys labeled by τ=±1 in such a way that the... 

Dirac cone can be tilted in condensed matter setting. As a result of tilt, the Lorentz symmetry is reduced to what we call tilted-Lorentz symmetry. In this paper, we derive the tilted-Lorentz transformations that leave a world with tilted Dirac cone invariant. © 2020, Isfahan University of Technology. All rights reserved  

Automatic brain tissue segmentation is a crucial task in diagnosis and treatment of medical images. This paper presents a new algorithm to segment different brain tissues, such as white matter (WM), gray matter (GM), cerebral spinal fluid (CSF), background (BKG), and tumor tissues. The proposed technique uses the modified intraframe coding yielded from H.264/(AVC), for feature extraction. Extracted features are then imposed to an artificial back propagation neural network (BPN) classifier to assign each block to its appropriate class. Since the newest coding standard, H.264/AVC, has the highest compression ratio, it decreases the dimension of extracted features and thus yields to a more... 

This paper presents a neural network-based method for automatic classification of magnetic resonance images (MRI) of brain under three categories of normal, lesion benign, and malignant. The proposed technique consists of six subsequent stages; namely, preprocessing, seeded region growing segmentation, connected component labeling (CCL), feature extraction, feature Dimension Reduction, and classification. In the preprocessing stage, the enhancement and restoration techniques are used to provide a more appropriate image for the subsequent automated stages. In the second stage, the seeded region growing segmentation is used for partitioning the image into meaningful regions. In the third... 

This paper aims at applying H.264/AVC in medical video compression applications and improving its compression performance with higher perceptual quality and lower coding complexity. We propose a new method that uses lossless compression in the region of interest (ROI) and very high rate lossy compression in other regions. The propose method achieves a fast intra- and interprediction mode decision that is based on encountering coarse MBs for intra- and inter- prediction mode decision of the background region and fine MBs for the ROI region. The MBs of the background region are encoded with the maximum quantization parameter allowed by H.264/AVC in order to maximize the number of null... 

For integers n, k, and i, the generalized Kneser graph K(n, k, i), is a graph whose vertices are subsets of size k of the set {1, 2, ..., n} and two vertices F and F are connected if and only if their intersection has less than i elements. In this paper we study the chromatic number of this graph. Some new bounds and properties for this chromatic number are derived. © 2017 University of Calgary  

Video transcoding comprises the necessary operations for the conversion of a compressed video stream from one syntax to another one for inter-network communications, without the need of any further decoding and re-encoding process. The two most recent and popular standard video coders are H.263 and H.264. In this paper, we present tools to enable low complexity intra transcoding from H.263 to H.264 using a novel fast intra prediction mode decision algorithm that does not require extra computation. It is shown that due to basic similarities of H.263 and H.264 it is possible to reuse predictor side information, so this side information is used to simplify the mode and direction decision for... 

Homomorphic (resp. abelian) secret sharing is a generalization of ubiquitous linear secret sharing in which the secret value and the shares are taken from finite (resp. abelian) groups instead of vector spaces over a finite field. Homomorphic secret sharing was first defined by Benaloh and, later in the early nineties, Frankel and Desmedt presented some relevant results. Except for a few other related topics such as black-box secret sharing and secret sharing over rings, the subject has remained dormant for about three decades. The study of homomorphic secret sharing is resumed in this paper and three main results are presented: (1) mixed-linear schemes, a subclass of abelian schemes to be... 

H.264/AVC, the latest video coding standard, achieves better video compression rates since it supports new features such as a large number of intra- and inter-prediction candidate modes. H.264/AVC adopts rate-distortion optimization (RDO) technique to obtain the best intra- and inter-prediction, while maximizing visual quality and minimizing the required bit rate. However, the RDO reduces the encoding speed via the exhaustive evaluation of all candidate modes. In this paper, we decrease the encoding time by reducing the computational complexity of the prediction function and the number of candidate modes. First, we improve Pan's method, by eliminating the DC mode from the candidates. Second,... 

With the advance of multimedia systems and wireless mobile communications, there has been a growing need to support multimedia services (such as mobile teleconferencing, mobile TV, telemedicine, and distance learning) using mobile multimedia technologies. Despite the research done in the field of mobile multimedia, delivery of real-time interactive video over noisy wireless channels is still a challenge for researchers. This paper presents a method for prioritising data partitioned MPEG-4 video in a way suitable for transmission over a mobile network. The effectiveness of the technique is demonstrated by examing its performance when the transport of the prioritized video streams can be... 

Core/shell structure of ZnO nanowires coated with a monolayer of TiO 2 is investigated using Density Functional Theory (DFT). The electronic states of the semiconductor is calculated and compared before and after coating of the TiO2 monolayer on a ZnO [101 0] surface. The effect of TiO2 coating induce surface states changes and shifts the conduction and valence band edges to higher energies. Our results, in qualitative agreement with the experimental work of Matt Law et al. (J. Phys. Chem. B, 110, 22652), show an increase in open circuit voltage and a decrease in short circuit current in ZnO/TiO2 core shell dye sensitized solar cells. Regarding the semiconductor density of states (DOS), TiO2...