Sharif Digital Repository

Self-leadership” is a process through which individuals control their performance and lead themselves by using specific behavioral and cognitive strategies (Manz, 1986; Manz and Neck, 2004). This concept includes a toolkit of behavioral activities borrowed from social cognitive theory and goal setting. It also includes constructive thought processes that have been extensively studied in sports psychology. Scholars have categorized the SL (self-leadership) strategies into three main categories; behavioral, natural reward and constructive thought Strategies. (Neck and Houghton, 2006) Given the growing importance of self-leadership in contemporary organizations operating in an increasingly... 

Nowadays, advanced and inexpensive pre-clinical methods for investigating the effects of anti-cancer drugs are expanding. One of the latest three-dimensional laboratory modeling for evaluating the effects of drugs is the use of tumor-on-chip technology, which actually models the physiological system of the body through three-dimensional scaffolds, multicellular cultures, and shaped vascular systems. In this study, three-dimensional culture of cancer cells was performed in the form of spheroids. A chip of U-shaped microstructures with and without gaps was used to trap cells and form cancer spheroids. We simulated the simultaneous effect of drug and oxygen concentration distribution inside the... 

Different molybdenum oxide nano/micro structure thin films were synthesized by thermal evaporation method under various growth conditions such as deposition time, temperature and evaporation source-substrate distance. Molybdenum oxide nanostructures grown on Si(100) such as nanowalls, nanostars and nanowires were characterized with scanning electron microscopy (SEM), x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), x-ray diffraction (XRD), atomic force microscopy (AFM) and high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM). Shape and type of nanostructures were determined with SEM, AFM and HRTEM analysis. XPS analysis showed that the synthesized nanostructures contained Mo6+, Mo5+, Mo4+ and... 

Two significant features of a transportation network, uncertainty and complexity, might cause some irregular behaviors. One example of such behaviors is chaotic flow in which the transportation system fails to reach equilibrium and people experience different daily travel times. These uncertainties are not controllable in any transportation system and, if not taken into consideration, will result to low levels of service and poor reliability. In this study, an evolutionary traffic assignmet model is used to illustrate when the network reaches bifurcation and chaos. Later, the effects of uncertainty in the parameters of supply and demand is tested on the evolutionary traffic assignment model.... 

Mankind with it’s finite resources (Time, Energy, …) cannot make use of every accessible option in daily activities (such as buying items, listening to music and reading news), and is restricted to decide on a handful of them. Available options are increasing on a daily basis and these surplus of available options had an adverse effect; Thus, leading us to more baffling situations. As a result, need for external assistance appeared in decision situations. Considering exceptional computation power available to computers, a framework named Recommender Systems were developed. Recommender systems try to use their accessible data in order to make fitting suggestions to users. Personalization and... 

Considering the extensive developments achieved up to now in the fields of trade and international transportation, as well as the key role of the freight transportation in the economical development of a zone or a country, the present research, titled “A Study of the Trade and Transportation Trends”, was planned. The available data concerning the trade of six types of the goods according to The United Nations Classification (SITC), within the period 1965-2005, have been analyzed in this research. The study has been focused on the Asian Multimodal Network constituted of 31 countries. Trading centre of each country in the selected network is assumed to be located in its capital town. The... 

The liquid breakup analysis and spray characteristics measurement of atomizer are very essential for the numerical modeling of the primary atomization in combustion chambers. The atomization process is irregular and random nature and is a chaotic phenomenon. This study was motivated by the lack of temporal analysis of the breakup process especially for the first and second wind-induced breakup regimes and the atomization regime. The aim of this study was to determine the location, velocity and structures of breakup liquid jet at different outlet pressures from 0.3 bar to 50 bar. The results indicate that the breakup length, ligament size, and the breakup time period are randomly varied in... 

Structures having buckling restrained braces (BRB) as earthquake resisting system, have the qualities of high lateral stiffness and the ability to damp the energy coming from earthquake, at the same time.In addition to new structures, these braces can also be used in rehabilitating old steel or concrete buildings. By using this kind of resisting system, smaller sections are needed in design of buildings and also the cost of repair after earthquake can be highly reduced.The most important advantage of buckling restrained braces is their equal behavior and capacity in both tention and compression, that causes high energy absorption as a result of symmetric and stable cyclic behavior. All these... 

Selecting a suitable material is crucial for repairing the old concrete structures and joining precast panels of bridges, especially the bond strength between the substrate concrete and the overlay material. In this regard, this research focused on high-performance alkali-activated slag concrete (HPASC) as a new concrete used as an overlay on ordinary Portland cement concrete (OPCC) as a block of old concrete. Approximately four hundred bi-surface shear (BSS) tests were performed to evaluate the interface properties of OPCC and HPASC. HPASC specimens were designed with different NaOH molarity, silica fume (SF) content, steel fiber content, age of repair material, and proportion of grooved... 

Artificial intelligence is a field that has made another revolution in the Fourth Industrial Revolution and has become one of the most widely used emerging technologies in the present era. Further investigation of the trends in this field shows that it has shown increasing growth in recent years. Also, in the future, this trend will continue and fundamental changes will occur in societies. For this reason, countries must definitely pay the necessary and sufficient attention to this field in their growth and development path. To achieve this growth path, it is intended to evaluate the status of leading countries in the field of artificial intelligence using two key variables in technological... 

Xylene isomers have similar boiling points and, therefore, their separation by conventional distillation is not practical. The industrial separation of these isomers is generally performed by adsorption or crystallization processes, which are very energy consuming. In this work, the various methods of the separation of these isomers have been reviewed and the equilibrium adsorption of these components in liquid phase using two commercial types of zeolite including Z-700 and Na-BETA as adsorbent at 15, 25, and 35 oC and an initial concentration range of up to 50 wt% as well as in single and binary solutions was investigated. It was found that Z-700 adsorbent has no selectivity for the binary... 

Human face-to-face communication is an ideal model for designing a multimodal/media human-computer interface (HCI). Recent advances in image analysis and pattern recognition open up the possibility of automatic detection and classification of emotional and conversational facial signals. Automating facial expression analysis could bring facial expressions into man-machine interaction as a new modality and make the interaction tighter and more efficient. In this research an accurate real-time sequence-based system for representation, recognition and analysis of low-intensity facial expressions and facial action uints (FAUs) is presented. The feature extraction is done using facial feature... 

Modeling and performance evaluation of the real time distributed systems is a significant problem. Stochastic activity network is one of the high level models used for this purpose. This network is an extension of generalized stochastic Petri net which is more powerful and flexible than other Petri net extensions. Checking the satisfiability of properties such as performance, dependability and user's expected properties is considerable in these models. Thus, using the approaches and generating modeling and model checking tools with the mentioned purpose is attractive. A model checker automatically checks the correctness of the system behaviors as properties against the model by getting the... 

This study has focused on the important problem of landing on a planet as an important current and future space mission. In this regard, dynamics modeling and integrated state estimation and control problems have been investigated in different views. To this aim, first a novel concurrent representation for translational and rotational kinematics has been developed based on the extension of modified Rodrigues parameters to dual space. This parameter set, called dual modified Rodrigues parameters (DMRP), is then utilized to establish an integrated roto-translational dynamic. The proposed DMRP-based kinematics and dynamics have been verified via comparison to traditional methods of... 

Prevalent deployment of Distributed Energy Resources(DERs) in the demand side of electrical energy grids has several advantages such as greenhouse gases emission reduction, mitigation of power losses in the distribution grids and abatement of the dependency on the wholesale generation companies. At the same time, it paves the way for the advent of local interactive energy trading frameworks. In the following thesis, a distributed data-driven algorithm is developed for market-clearing in a community-based local energy market. The social welfare maximization is considered as the objective of the energy trading. The production and demand of electricity are the decision variables of sellers and... 

Understanding biological systems requires extensive knowledge of individual parameters, and to study the processes of cell differentiation and cell behavior, a suitable environment must be created with the physiological conditions of the human body. For this purpose, with the knowledge of microfluidics, a microenvironment can be provided to study the behavior of cells on a small scale. The use of bone tissue model microfluidic chips is an alternative and new method in which it is possible to study the behavior of cells to differentiate into bone and to examine the toxicity of drugs, which in itself can help in the effective and successful treatment of these cases show. Therefore, in this...