Sharif Digital Repository

Think of an Alpine hiker who because of avalanche and a blinding blizzard, is stranded on a desolate, mountain path facing a chasm. The hiker cannot return the way he came because of the avalanche, yet, if he stays where he is, he will freeze as the temperature plummets. The hiker’s only real hope is to jump the chasm. Knowing that exertion generally follows belief, the hiker realizes that his attempt will be half-hearted, diminishing his chance of survival, unless he brings himself to the belief that he can make the jump. In circumstances like these, one is clearly justified both in forming beliefs motivated by pragmatic reasons, and in suppressing beliefs (I cannot make the jump) motivated... 

The thesis at hand provides a comparative study of Kantian and Fichtean ethics. In the course of this study, the ethical theory of these philosophers will be analyzed through three stages of “Foundation of Ethics,” “System of Ethics,” and “Application of Ethics”: Foundation of Ethics seeks out human will as the sole possible ground for ethical theory of both Kant and Fichte; System of Ethics follows the endeavors of the two thinkers in deducing concept of ethics from this sole ground; and lastly, Application of Ethics introduces the ethical thoughts resulting from a Fichtean account of ethics. This thesis is mostly based upon studies of Allen W. Wood of the ethical thoughts of Kant and... 

In this thesis a smart anticorrosive pH-responsive coat was developed with layer by layer (LbL) technique in the assembly of SiO2/CTAB/PSS/HMTA/PSS/PEI/PSS. SiO2 nanoparticles were prepared from Matland Company (Iran) with average size of 24 nm. At first, the corrosion inhibition of HMTA for API 5L Grade B steel in 3.5 wt.% NaCl solution was investigated. Tafel polarization technique showed the optimum concentration of HMTA was 0.08 M with 92% corrosion inhibition efficiency as the morphology of coverage and adsorption on the steel surface was confirmed by SEM and EDS. AFM results showed the roughness of the surface decreased from 241 nm to 56 nm that is attributed to HMTA adsorption on the... 

In recent years, sparse representation has had a variety of applications in computer vision such as noise reduction, image reconstruction, classification and dimension reduction. In this project, we aim to provide a method of matching the keypoints obtained from the Scale Invariant feature Transform (SIFT) algorithm. In this algorithm is used descriptor instead of intensity . The proposed method, first, extracts the salient points from the images and learns a dictionary-based descriptors corresponding to the points. Then, using the dictionary, it obtains the sparse coefficients for each salient point by which, it determines the correspondence of the salient points in the two images using SVD... 

This study investigates the possibility of knowledge transfer from military industries, with a focus on the missile industry, to other sectors in the country, particularly the automotive industry, from the perspective of technological capabilities. The objective of this research is to conduct a comparative analysis of the technological capabilities of these two industries and to evaluate the potential and challenges associated with the process of knowledge and technology transfer. The research methodology involves qualitative analysis through interviews with experts and the review of relevant documents and records. The conceptual framework has been developed based on existing models of... 

Business Processes are a set of activities which is designed for produce specific output for specific customer or market. Nowadays business processes have a significant role in organizations and they progress to mechanized business processes and transform them to executable workflows. Existence of complex domains with particular requirements from one hand and scale of business projects on the other hand, make existing business processes, which only consider structure and flow of work, are not enough for fulfillment of organizational requirements. By provision of semantics into business processes, which Semantic Web technologies is used in them, business processes become more flexible and... 

By definition, Mobile Clouds are networks of mobile nodes, which are connected together using short-range communication links, and at the same time keep their connection with the long-range cellular networks. Short-range communication links in Mobile Clouds provide the opportunity of Resource Sharing, which can result in new services for end-users. These services are beyond the boundaries of traditional networks.
In the following report, we aim at focusing on some problems related to Mobile Clouds. First, we present a centralized model for managing the mobility of the nodes; then we try to propose algorithms for efficient data update and processing; and finally, we introduce a novel... 

The search for an empirically proven quantum theory of gravity is one of the greatest open problems of fundamental physics. Obstacles are formal and conceptual in nature. Our goal is to find a theory that somehow unites general relativity (Einstein's classical field gravity theory) and quantum field theory. In this research work, the problem of quantum gravity and the reason for its importance are investigated, as well as the proposed solutions; and what philosophical issues do these approaches and the issue itself create. Research has been carefully selected to remain managed in terms of size and content, however, some basic formalism is introduced to enter physics and the philosophy of... 

A user-provided network (UPN) has the potential to achieve a low cost ubiq-uitous Internet connectivity without the need of significantly increase of network infrastructure investment.In this article, we consider such a network where the network operator encourages some of her subscribers to operator as mobile Wi-Fi hotspots (hosts), providing Inter-net connectivity for other subscribers (clients). We formulate the interaction between the operators and mobile users as a two-stage game. In Stage I, the operator decides the usage-based pricing and quota-based incentive mechanism for the data usage. In Stage II, the mobile users decide the membership selection, i.e., choosing to be a host, or a... 

the purpose of this research is to construct the facial image of a person from corresponding DNA. In this problem, we have a set of DNAs and facial images and we want to find the relation between the DNA and the features of facial images.using this relation we can find the facial Image of a person using the DNA. for this purpose we should first extract the features of faces that have the most variation among the population. by studying the feature extraction methods in this field, we borrow the deep neural network method that is used in face recognition fields.we found significant relations between DNA and extracted features from this network. finally using this relation we can predict the... 

Edge AI, an emerging approach, aims to provide AI services by utilizing computing resources at the edge of the network rather than relying on cloud servers. This offers advantages such as reduced latency, improved efficiency, privacy preservation, and resilience. Model inference at the edge is a crucial area in this domain, where a trained model is deployed to an edge server or user device. Deploying models on resource constrained edge devices poses key challenges, including optimizing and compressing the models to fit within limited computational and memory constraints. Additionally, ensuring the deployed model can perform inference within required time constraints is critical. Research... 

Nowadays, enormous amounts of data are transferred through data communication networks every day in order to fulfill end users’ demands all over the world.The capacities of the links between network nodes, or in other words, the amount of bandwidth available to carry data is undoubtedly one of the most expensive resources as well as the one of most importance which not only plays an essential role in communicating information packets over such a vast network, but is a major determinant of Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of rapidity as well. The idea of using cache memories to optimize network bandwidth consumption laid the foundation for developing Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). In such... 

Black holes are theoretically significant because they are (ideal) entities fully described by just three properties: mass, charge, and spin. Their importance also stems from their unique status as spacetime entities with universal properties, including the event horizon and—when including the singularity—representing the boundary of space and time. Beyond their spacetime properties, black holes are also thermodynamic systems. Their behavior requires a theory that integrates both spacetime and thermodynamics. A black hole is something that requires both a theory of spacetime and a theory of thermodynamics to describe and explain its behavior. A consistent description of time, spacetime, and... 

By “Analysis of Epistemological Justification of Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE)” I mean to examine whether the IBE argument can increase the probability of the truth of belief to the outcome of the argument or not. According to the Strong Version of IBE, this increase shows that the best explanation is more likely to be true, whereas according to the Weak Version the best explanation is more probable than its available rivals. The most influential arguments against these positions are: (1) The bad lot objection (BLO) according to which the idea that the best available explanations will be more likely to be true, presupposes that the truth is already more likely to be found among... 

In Naming and Necessity and Identity and Necessity, Kripke convinced many that there are necessary propositions which are knowable only a posteriori. Kripke’s examples of these propositions can be placed into three categories: 1) Some mathematical propositions like Goldbach’s conjecture (the conjecture that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes) 2) Scientific truths like “Water is H2O”, “Gold has the atomic number 79”, etc. 3) Identity statements flanked on both sides with proper names; like “Hesperus is Phosphorus”, “Cicero is Tully” and the like (in the rest of this article, these three categories will be called, respectively, the first, the second and... 

In his Mind, Brain and Free Will, Swinburne introduces a new argument for substance dualism based on the synchronic unity of humans’ conscious experiences. He argues that the human body cannot be the substance of such a synchronic unity, and that this coexperiencing property, which is a mental property, is the essential property of the human substance: hence our substance is a mental substance. After providing a careful explanation of Swinburne’s subtle argument, I first try to demonstrate that it is metaphysically possible that the brain itself could instantiate such a synchronic unity without the need to presume another substance. Then I shall argue that it is unclear how to infer the... 

This dissertation consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, a description of formation of Darwin's theory of Evolution is expressed. After that, the process of formation of modern theory of Evolution, along with an explanation of the theory of evolution and the evidence for it was mentioned. In the second season, which is responsible for the scientific study of the theory, at some point the evidence of this theory has been reviewed. After that, some of the challenges raised against this theory have been studied. The major scientific challenges described in this chapter is based on recent advances made in biology, based on that, the mechanism of theory can’t explain the complex... 

Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (1912-1989) is an analytic philosopher whose philosophy is famous for being deep, systematic and extremely influential and notorious for being difficult to read. Although he has many original and interconnected ideas in different branches of philosophy- including metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics, philosophy of language and meta-philosophy- the place of science in his system is completely indispensable. In his meta-philosophy, Sellars defines his philosophical project as an attempt to reconcile two distinct world-views of humanity in the modern word; scientific image and manifest image. Approaching Sellars’ philosophy by placing science at the... 

Michael Zimmerman in his book Living with Uncertainty has objected to two views of moral obligation, namely objective and subjective view. Two overcome these problems he suggests a third view which he calls prospective view and tells us that our moral obligation is determined by the prospection that each of our choices give us. In this thesis first I review Zimmerman’s objections to objective and subjective view. Then I try to suggest a solution for the objective view  

Technological capabilities as one of the growth’s aspects in developing countries have gained focus for research in last years. This study attempt to analyze the pattern of technological capabilities in four different sectors including Optic, Aerospace, Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology. In each sectors four Iranian companies as the case studies are selected. After deep interviews with key people in each company, required data is gathered. Data in each company is analyzed. The results of analysis for companies in one sector are gathered for analyzing each sector. In order to evaluate technological capabilities, the time required to improve, lead-lag relationship for gaining higher levels of...