Sharif Digital Repository

Human brain is one the most efficient biological neural network that is capable of performing most complicated tasks in very short time. Visual system as a part of the brain can process the visual records from the environment and perform very useful processes on them. The information provided from visual system processes play important roles in human intelligence. In this thesis we introduce and investigate one of the well-known theories about visual system called gestalt theories. These theories tried to define how a biological neural network can perform such results. Gestalt theorists developed rules of perception to explain their ideas including Law of Pragnanz, Similarity, Closure,... 

Distributed computation has an important role in data mining. Data mining, usually requires a lot of resources both in terms of storage space and computing time. To reach scalability, some mechanisms for the distribution of work is required. Moreover, in many systems today, data is distributed in several databases. In this case, due to traffic overload in network, transferring all data to a central server and applying process centrally is inefficient and is subject to privacy issues. Distributed data mining provides some techniques for efficient mining in decentralized mode. Identifying frequent itemsets is one of the important branches of data mining. Frequent patterns are set of items,... 

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... 

Given two speech segments, the task of speaker verification is defined as determining whether or not both of them have been uttered by the same person. Most of the new approaches in speaker verification are based on Total Variability Space which is the result of applying a factor analysis on GMM mean supervector space. The representation of speech with arbitrary duration in this space is called i-vector.
In this thesis, first the basics of speaker verification is described and i-vector approaches are explained in more details. Then, a method for improving accuracy of Cosine Similarity Scoring is proposed which normalize the raw score using the score of test utterance against a model- and... 

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... 

Cardiovascular diseases are among the leading causes of death worldwide. For instance, in 2015, almost 31% of the world’s mortality rate was due to these causes. One of these diseases is cardiac coronary vessels’ occlusion which leads to the insufficient blood supply to the heart tissue and cardiomyocytes death after Myocardial Infarction (MI). After MI, a hierarchy of events in the heart tissue changes heart muscle and forms cardiac fibrosis. This fibrotic tissue does not have the native one’s properties and function, so it will cause cardiac arrest and patient death. Therefore, it is obvious that vascular network plays a crucial role in the heart function. The importance of cardiac... 

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... 

This thesis addresses the problem of optimal distributed control of unknown interconnected systems. In order to deal with this problem, a data-driven learning framework for finding the optimal centralized and the suboptimal distributed controllers has been developed via convex optimization.First of all, the linear quadratic regulation (LQR) problem is formulated into a nonconvex optimization problem. Using Lagrangian duality theories, a semidefinite program is then developed that requires information about the system dynamics. It is shown that the optimal solution to this problem is independent of the initial conditions and represents the Q-function, an important concept in reinforcement... 

Accurate and fast attitude estimation of a rigid body plays an essential role in the performance of a vehicle’s control system, especially aerospace vehicles. Ample works have been done to increase the accuracy and speed of the attitude estimation process, but all have been developed according to a model-based approach. This approach assumes that the torques acting on the body have a known dynamical model that is used for the attitude estimation. The purpose of the present research is to estimate the attitude via a model-free approach, i. e. dynamics of the torques acting on the body are no longer assumed to be known, and its learning is the next step. Thus, the problem formulation of this... 

This thesis presents a new approach to design structural output feedback controllers with stabilization and pole-placement at desired points on the S plane. It is assumed that the linear time-invariant system has no fixed mode corresponding to the specified control structure, outside the desired region of the closed-loop poles, such that the structural controller design problem is theoretically feasible. To this end, the structural output controller design problem is first transformed into a structurally equivalent problem based on the solution of a set of discrete linear programs. Then, by using the resultant structure, a new method is proposed for designing static and dynamic control loops... 

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) currently remains a considerable challenge for clinical treatments. CVDs account for N17.5 million deaths per year and will predictably increase to 23.6 million by 2030. The main purpose is to create human model systems to study the effect of disease mutations or drug treatment on the heart. In addition, engineered cardiac tissues are considered promising candidates to be transplanted to improve the function of diseased hearts. For engineered active tissues/organs, 3D bioprinting can fabricate complex tissue architecture with a spatiotemporal distribution of bioactive substances (cells, growth factors, and others) to better guide tissue regeneration. However,... 

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... 

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... 

The main topic of this research is the navigation and control of a free-flying satellite with a robot manipulator while transferring and placing cargo on a space station. After connecting the cargo module, astronauts and robots need to deliver the available loads to the desired modules in a space station. Capturing an object or cargo is a critical issue studied extensively so far. However, delivery and placing of the cargo at the target point have not been investigated yet, to the best of the author’s knowledge; hence, this is a primary motivation for conducting the proposed research. After capturing the payload, the position and attitude of the manipulator with respect to the station’s... 

This thesis introduces a distributed backstepping control strategy based on reinforcement learning to achieve fixed-time consensus in high-order nonlinear multi-agent systems. Each agent, whether a leader or a follower, is modeled using a strict feedback approach, incorporating uncertainties as unknown nonlinear functions and disturbance signals across all state variables. The communication network among agents can be either directed or undirected, with a fixed topology. Each follower employs a control law derived from actor-critic networks, utilizing only the outputs from neighboring agents. The proposed method combines virtual and actual backstepping control laws, formulated from two key... 

In this thesis, a new method is proposed to find the class of stabilizing control structures for interconnected systems from a graphtheoretic
perspective. The objective is to classify all possible control structures (static or dynamic), capable of stabilizing the closedloop system. The method can be formulated by using the characteristics of fixed modes of the system for arbitrary control structures.To this end, first, a method is proposed based on solving a set of discrete linear programming to determine whether a system is stabilizable via a decentralized controller. Subsequently, by solving a set of discrete linear feasibility problems, all possible stabilizing controller structures... 

It's impossible to check all inputs of a software program due to infinite input domain, therefore the domain should be somehow restricted. One popular approach to do so, is input space partitioning. In this approach, the input domain has been modeled and partitioned into some equivalent classes or blocks. Using these blocks, it's possible to select one sample from each one and reduce the number of test cases to a small desirable number. To automate this approach, it's essential to firstly define the software requirements specification in a well-defined machine understandable template, then with processing this document we can detect program’s functionality and testable functions. Our goal in... 

Mutation testing is known to be one of the best strategies to improve the quality of test suites, consequently the quality of the software. However, some challenges make mutaton testing unpractical. One of the main challenges confronting mutation testing is that it demands exhustive computation and is time consuming because of the large number of mutants that need to be compiled and executed on the test cases of the test suite. Many researches have been conducted to reduce the number of mutants without losing the main characteristics of the all possible mutants. Most of these researches select the mutants without considering the characteristics of the test suite, therefore the reduced set of...