Sharif Digital Repository

A genetic programming technique was employed to develop empirical models for predicting specific wear rate and coefficient of friction on brake friction materials. The models consist of independent variables representing the volume fraction of the ingredients. The average absolute relative error for specific wear rate and coefficient of friction were found to be 1.93% and 1.92%, respectively. The models were also verified by the experimental data used for further control of the formulation. Utilizing Tornado plots, the models were found to be able to properly demonstrate the role of the ingredients on overall tribological performance of the brake friction materials. Moreover, a non-dominated... 

Understanding the adsorption dynamics of nanoparticles at solid-liquid interfaces is of paramount importance to engineer nanoparticles for a variety of applications. The nanoparticle surface chemistry is significant for controlling the adsorption dynamics. This study aimed to experimentally examine the adsorption of surface-modified round-shaped silica nanoparticles (with an average diameter of 12 nm), grafted with hydrophobic (propyl chains) and/or hydrophilic (polyethylene glycol chains) agents, at an aqueous solution-silica interface with spherical soda-lime glass beads (diameter of 3 mm) being used as adsorbents. While no measurable adsorption was observed for solely hydrophobic or... 

A composite coating containing silver, fluoride and hydroxyapatite (Ag-FHA) was developed on titanium substrate by sol-gel method. Triethylphosphite, hydrated calcium nitrate, ammonium fluoride and silver nitrate were used respectively, as P, Ca, F and Ag precursors with a Ca:P ratio 1.67 and concentration of silver was 0.3 wt%. Coatings were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), X-ray diffraction (XRD), field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) and atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS). Potentiodynamic polarization measurements in simulated body fluid proved corrosion protection caused by both Ag-FHA coatings. Antibacterial activity of coatings against... 

Identifying the factors affecting profitability is important from the perspective of market players. One of the most important benchmarks of firm performance is accounting profit and effective factors analysis so that users of accounting information analyse the factors affecting profit, firm performance and various aspects of its performance and according to estimates Done, make your own decision on how to allocate resources. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of some factors of competitiveness, entrepreneurship and business environment indicators on the profitability of the world’s top companies. For this purpose, 176 top companies in the world from 2013 to 2018... 

Identifying the factors affecting profitability is important from the perspective of market players. One of the most important benchmarks of firm performance is accounting profit and effective factors analysis so that users of accounting information analyse the factors affecting profit, firm performance and various aspects of its performance and according to estimates Done, make your own decision on how to allocate resources. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of some factors of competitiveness, entrepreneurship and business environment indicators on the profitability of the world’s top companies. For this purpose, 176 top companies in the world from 2013 to 2018... 

Removal of aromatic compounds from fuel is an essential requirement in new environmental policies. In the present study, poly(vinyl alcohol)/graphene oxide (GO) mixed matrix membranes were prepared and applied to the separation of toluene from iso-octane by pervaporation, considering the similarity and interaction between graphene and aromatics. The effects of crosslinking and GO content on separation efficiency have been investigated in detail. Owing to the high affinity of GO with toluene through s and π bonds, the selectivity of the membranes was increased by incorporating a low amount of GO. The results also indicated that noncrosslinked membranes have higher selectivity and permeation... 

Karyotype is a genetic test that is used for detection of chromosomal defects. In a karyotype test, an image is captured from chromosomes during the cell division. The captured images are then analyzed by cytogeneticists in order to detect possible chromosomal defects. In this paper, we have proposed an automated pipeline for analysis of karyotype images. There are three main steps for karyotype image analysis: image enhancement, image segmentation and chromosome classification. In this paper, we have proposed a novel chromosome segmentation algorithm to decompose overlapped chromosomes. We have also proposed a CNN-based classifier which outperforms all the existing classifiers. Our... 

We investigate the dynamic localization of light in the sinusoidal bent squeezed-like photonic lattices, a class of inhomogeneous semi-infinite waveguide arrays. Our findings show that, dynamic localization takes place for the normalized amplitude of sinusoidal profile (α) above a critical value α c. In this regime, for any normalized amplitude α>αc, there is a specific spatial period (ℓ) of waveguides, in which the dynamical oscillation, with the same spatial period occurs. Moreover, the specific spatial period is a decreasing function of the normalized amplitude α. Accordingly, the dynamical oscillation and self-imaging is realized, in spite of the existence of inhomogeneous coupling... 

The Gaussian mixture probability hypothesis density (GM-PHD) filter is a closed form approximation of the multi-target Bayes filter which can overcome most multitarget tracking problems. Limited field of view, decreasing cost of cameras, and advances of using multi-camera induce us to use large-scale camera networks. In this paper, a multihuman tracking framework using the PHD filter in a distributed camera network is proposed. Each camera tracks objects locally with PHD filter and a track-after-detect scheme and its estimates of targets are sent to neighboring nodes. Then each camera fuses its local estimates with it's neighbors. The proposed method is evaluated on the public PETS2009... 

We study mix-nets with randomized partial checking (RPC) as proposed by Jakobsson, Juels, and Rivest (2002). RPC is a technique to verify the correctness of an execution both for Chaumian and homomorphic mix-nets. The idea is to relax the correctness and privacy requirements to achieve a more efficient mix-net. We identify serious issues in the original description of mix-nets with RPC and show how to exploit these to break both correctness and privacy, both for Chaumian and homomorphic mix-nets. Our attacks are practical and applicable to real world mix-net implementations, e.g., the Civitas and the Scantegrity voting systems  

We describe several return code schemes for secure vote submission in electronic voting systems. We consider a unified treatment where a return code is generated as a multiparty computation of a secure MAC tag applied on an encrypted message submitted by a voter. Our proposals enjoy a great level of flexibility with respect to various usability, security, and performance tradeoffs. © 2017, Springer International Publishing AG  

Hill is a classical cipher which is generally believed to be resistant against ciphertext-only attack. In this paper, by using a divide-and-conquer technique, it is first shown that Hill with d×d key matrix over Z26 can be broken with computational complexity of O(d26d), for the English language. This is much less than the only publicly known attack, i.e., the brute-force with complexity of O(d326d2). Then by using the Chinese Remainder Theorem, it is shown that the computational complexity of the proposed attack can be reduced down to O(d13d). Using an information-theoretic approach, it is shown that the minimum ciphertext length required for a successful attack increases by a factor of...