Sharif Digital Repository

Many real-world communication systems such as Internet, online social networks, and brain networks can be modeled as a complex network of interacting dynamical nodes. These networks have non-trivial topological features, i.e., features that do not occur in simple networks such as lattices or random networks. The tremendous growth of Internet and its applications in recent years has resulted in creation of large-scale complex networks involving tens or hundreds of millions of nodes and links. Thus, it may be impossible or costly to obtain a complete picture of these large networks, and sampling methods are essential for practical estimation of network properties. Therefore, in this thesis, we... 

Hyperspectral imaging is one of the remote sensing methods that has been widely applied in different applications. A hyperspectral image is composed of a set of pixels showing the spectral signatures in different frequency bands recorded by sensor cells. The process that detects the proportion of pure elements in the combination of pixels is called hyperspectral unmixing. Noisy and incomplete data, high mutual coherence of spectral libraries and different sensor settings are some challenges of the unmixing problem. In this work, we focus on semi-supervised linear hyperspectral unmixing in which a spectral library is given. The resulting linear equation is an underdetermind problem with... 

It is generally believed that the only utility of tests as a critical instrument is to be at the service of educational institutions. To broadly consider their different usefulness, tests can serve other purposes like focusing on the ethical and moral issues. As it is called Critical Language Testing, tests are not reliable instruments and they have the capacity of being used not only in educational, but also in political contexts. This philosophy has not been brought into perspective, and, as a result, the literature deserves more comprehensive attention. This study, guided by the principles of Grounded Theory and Qualitative research design, pursued three purposes: To investigate the... 

Modeling and simulation of acid transport in fractured porous medium and the formation of wormholes are the main goals of this dissertation. Injection of acid in rocks is one of the enhanced oil recovery methods which is extensively used in industry. The flow of acid in a porous medium produces a highly permeable path which is called wormholes. The formation of these wormholes is dependent on parameters of rock, acid and injection properties. As a result, simulation and prediction of this phenomenon are very important for optimization. Some researches developed methods to model this phenomenon in porous media but few of them investigated discontinuities in a medium. This research uses... 

Autoencoder, as an essential part of many anomaly detection methods, is lacking flexibility on normal data in complex datasets. U-Net is proved to be effective for this purpose but overfits on the training data if trained by just using reconstruction error similar to other AE-based frameworks. Puzzle-solving, as a pretext task of self-supervised learning (SSL) methods, has earlier proved its ability in learning semantically meaningful features. We show that training U-Nets based on this task is an effective remedy that prevents overfitting and facilitates learning beyond pixel-level features. Shortcut solutions, however,are a big challenge in SSL tasks, including jigsaw puzzles. We propose... 

A large number of machine learning problems are considered as structured output problems in which the goal is to find the mapping function between an input vector to a number of variables in the output side which are statistically correlated. Motivated by the advantages of simultaneous learning of these variables compared to learning them separately, many structured output models have been introduced. Decreasing the sample complexity, increasing the generalization ability and overcoming to noisy data are some of these benefits. So in the first step of this research we concentrate on one of classical but important problems in bioinformatics which is automatic protein function prediction.... 

Traditional assumptions about assessment and learning have been challenged in higher education. Alternative types of assessment have been introduced to align to the students’ learning aims. Although, the growing body of literature of alternative types of assessment such as peer-assessment and self-assessment shed light on the advantages and benefits of embedding assessment in classroom activities, there is not absolute agreement on the consistency and accuracy of these types of assessment. To this aim, this study attempted to investigate the reliability and validity of self-assessment and peer-assessment of Iranian EFL learners’ written and oral production. The data was obtained from 32... 

Increased uncertainty in the business environment as well as becoming modern and complicated have made supply chains more vulnerable to environmental disruptions than ever before. Due to their unpredictability, these disruptions can cause irreparable damage to supply chains and threaten their survival. Considering the novelty of the concept of e-commerce retail businesses in Iran, the importance of meeting customer expectations to boost the growth of these businesses, and the existence of many uncertainties in the business environment of these organizations, their supply chain resilience against disruptions is very important. Also, the importance of the role of logistics in meeting the...