Sharif Digital Repository

We model the problem of assigning counsel to poor defendants as a matching problem. A novel aspect of this matching problem is the moral hazard component on the part of counsel. Within the model, we show that holding the total expenditure for counsel fixed and changing the matching procedure to accommodate defendants' and attorneys' preferences, i.e., switch from random matching to stable matching, defendants become worse offbecause a stable matching exacerbates the moral hazard problem on the part of counsel. In addition, we show that under suitable conditions random matching is the efficient way to allocate defendants to counsel. © 2018 American Economic Association  

This study presents a bilayer structure as a skin scaffold comprised of an electrospun sheet layer made of polycaprolactone and polyvinil alcohol and a porous hydrogel layer made of chitosan and gelatin. The hydrogel layer was fabricated by employing the freeze-gelation technique. The bilayer structure was achieved by pouring the hydrogel solution on the electrospun sheet at the bottom of a mold followed by the freeze-gelation technique to obtain a porous structure in the hydrogel. The hydrogel and hydrogel-electrospun samples were characterized by scanning electron microscopy, swelling, tensile strength, in vitro and in vivo analyses. From a mechanical strength standpoint, the combination... 

Recommender Systems have become an attractive field within the recent decade because they facilitate users' selection process within limited time. Conventional recommender systems have proposed numerous methods focusing on recommendations to individual users. Recently, due to a significant increase in the number of users, studies in this field have shifted to properly identify groups of people with similar preferences and provide a list of recommendations for each group. Offering a recommendations list to each individual requires significant computational cost and it is therefore often not efficient. So far, most of the studies impose four restrictive assumptions: (1) limited number of... 

Demand forecasting plays an important role as a decision support tool in power system management, especially in smart grid and liberalized power market. In this paper, a demand forecasting method is presented by using support vector regression (SVR). The proposed method is applied to practical hourly data of the Greater Tehran Electricity Distribution Company. The SVR parameters are selected by using a grid optimization process and an investigation on different kernel functions. Moreover, correlation analysis is used to find exogenous variables. Acceptable accuracy of load prediction is shown by comparing the result of SVR model to that of the artificial neural networks and the actual data,... 

In this paper, a novel, A-shaped microrobot with nanometric resolution for precision positioning applications is addressed. The locomotion concept of the mechanism is founded on the "friction drive principle". To achieve the translational motion, a stack piezoelectric actuates the microrobot near its natural frequency. The dynamic modeling of the mechanism is based on the assumptions of linear behavior of piezo stack actuator and Coulomb friction model at contact points. The suitability of three simple, friction-based locomotion modes for implementation on the proposed device is presented. Influences of different friction coefficients on the behavior of the microrobot, with respect to... 

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is the most popular symmetric encryption method, which encrypts streams of data by using symmetric keys. The current preferable AES architectures employ effective methods to achieve two important goals: protection against power analysis attacks and high-throughput. Based on a different architectural point of view, we implement a particular parallel architecture for the latter goal, which is capable of implementing a more efficient pipelining in field-programmable gate array (FPGA). In this regard, all intermediate registers which have a role for unrolling the main loop will be removed. Also, instead of unrolling the main loop of AES algorithm, we implement... 

Network on Chip (NoC) is the most common interconnection platform for multiprocessor systems-on-chips (MPSoCs). In order to explore the design space of this platform, we need a high-speed, cycle-accurate, and flexible simulation tool. In this paper, we present AdapNoC, a configurable cycle-accurate FPGA-based NoC simulator, which can be configured via software. A wide range of parameters are configurable in FPGA side of the proposed simulator, and the software side is implemented on an embedded soft-core processor. We transfer some parts of simulator, such as Traffic Generators (TGs) and Traffic Receptors (TRs), to software side without any degradation in simulation speed. Moreover, we... 

In this work, a general semi-analytical method for the determination of the elastic fields within an anisotropic homogeneous elastic solid with an inclined edge or interior crack is developed. In this method, the displacement field is represented as a sum of a function and a finite series of functions with unknown coefficients. The functions are constructed in such a way that all the essential homogeneous and inhomogeneous boundary conditions are satisfied exactly and, moreover, the displacement discontinuity across the crack faces as well as the exact singular behaviour of the stress field at the crack-tip are captured. The unknown coefficients are determined by utilizing the principle of... 

The friction drive principle, which is based on the superposition of two synchronized perpendicular vibrations at the interface of the robot and the work floor, plays a fundamental role in the locomotion of miniaturized robots. In this paper, the iteration perturbation method proposed by He is used to generate a periodic solution for this type of friction drive microrobot. The equation of motion for the system reveals a parametrically excited oscillator with discontinuity, the elastic force term for which is proportional to a signum function. The obtained solutions are in excellent agreement with those achieved from numerical integration and experiments reported in the literature. Results... 

In this paper, we investigate the influence of nonideal boundary conditions on the nonlinear vibration of damped Euler-Bernoulli beams subjected to harmonic loads. These nonidealities allow for small deflections and/or moments at the supports of the beam. Using the iteration perturbation method, analytical expressions for the case of simply supported beams with immovable end conditions are provided. The results reveal that the first order of approximation obtained by the proposed method is more accurate than the perturbation solutions. Moreover, compared with the previous studies, some interesting phenomenon is predicted. We have shown that in some special combinations of the nonidealities...