Sharif Digital Repository

The use of super-swelling polymers is steadily increasing and the applications in industry are continuing to grow. With the authorization of the superabsorbents in food packaging by the Food and Drug Administration recently, demand may soon take off in the market. The worldwide production of SAPs is more than one million tons per year, representing a multibillion-dollar market. However, the increase in prices of petroleum products in recent years may be a drawback for these acrylic-based materials. Thus, there is now a need to develop natural-based super-swelling hydrogels which are more economical and environment friendly. In addition, the super-swelling gels are promising novel functions... 

Nowadays, BDI architecture is of the most well known agent’s architectures. BDI architecture or the architecture in which the system is viewed as rational agents based on the attitudes of belief, desire and intention represents an abstraction of human deliberation based on a theory of rational action in the human cognition process. BDI logic introduced by Rao and Georgeff have been widely used as the theoretical basis of specification and implementation of rational agents. BDI logic is limited to deal with crisp assertion, while the assertions encountered in real world are not precise and thus cannot be treated simply by using yes or no. Moreover, In order to obtain more human like agents we... 

Although rural inhabitants constitute a large portion of developing countries’ population, they have always been neglected in many ways. Expansion of equity, calls for a new concern in adequacy of rural development. The problem could be considered in two aspects: Firstly, there is a great tendency for immigration to nearby cities, hoping for a better life. This would result in more crowded cities, extended poverty and an increasing rate of crime mainly in suburban areas. On the other hand, the evacuation of farms and fertilized lands imposes great economical loss to the country. Therefore, development of rural facilities should be integrated into national policies to assure a homogeneous and... 

As the size and complexity of software increase, the number of software vulnerabilities also increases. An examination of vulnerability reports shows that in addition to the fact that a large number of unknown vulnerabilities still exist in software, there is still no proper solution for identifying vulnerabilities that have been observed one sample of them exit in real-world software. The main reason for such an event is the lack of a suitable template for recognized vulnerabilities, which ultimately makes searching for them in other software a problem of scalability and high search cost. This thesis, recognizing the importance of the issue, presents a framework for extracting robust and... 

Airports are one of the most important elements of the aviation system that provide the ground infrastructure that is required for enabling or flight across the globe. Master Planning is currently the dominant approach to airport strategic planning. However, history shows that this approach can often result in costly mistakes. Because there are many stakeholders with conflicting objectives, deep uncertainty about the future, and many potential strategies, planners often narrow their scope by using a single forecast for the future, leaving out alternative strategies, and excluding stakeholders, resulting in a Master Plan that quickly becomes obsolete and may be opposed by some stakeholders.... 

According to privileged risks existing in process industries and intensity of their consequences, Safety investigation and risk assessment are highly significant in these unites. Execution of risk assessment in process unites has been constituted from two qualitative and quantitative parts. The most crucial issue in risk assessment procedure is uncertainties related to data and needed information, besides of various models presented. This subject frequently relates to deficiency, ambiguity, and inaccessibility of necessary information for specifying of risk assessment characteristics i.e., event reproducibility and their intensities. In this work for overcome these constraints, bow-tie fuzzy... 

One of the most essential part of power system are transmission lines. Transmission of power from production centers to consumption centers is duty of these lines. Any disturbance in this duty make great losses to producers and consumers. One of the most disturbance in transmission lines are short circuits that occurred because of various causes. Most faults on transmission lines occurred in stormy weather that make more troubles for fault search. So we need a tool that can find location of fault precisely and quickly. This tool named fault locator. There are many algorithms for fault location and detection on power system transmission lines. These algorithms usually are dependent on very... 

The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the linkage between two constructs about teamwork activities. One of them is "self-leadership in teamwork", the extent to which a person could control and manage his thoughts and activities in teamwork. The other is "shared leadership orientation", which is about orientation of people to contribute in leadership processes. This linkage evaluated with consideration of "self-efficacy in shared leadership" as a moderator.
Questionnaires of self-leadership in teamwork and self-efficacy in shared leadership elicited from literature with a little change and shared leadership questionnaire developed in another study by the author.Questionnaires... 

Women are going to play more important roles in the economy of most countries including Iran. Hence, since the number of entrepreneurs among women is increasing, identifying characteristics and other factors that cause these group to be successful, is a critical issue. Studies show that entrepreneurs, especially women entrepreneurs, face numerous problems in their career. These problems are especially more demanding in societies with unique cultural attributes. Therefore, applying personal and managerial solutions in order to overcome these problems are necessary. On the other hand, researchers believe that one of the most effective and beneficial concepts helping entrepreneurs in their... 

The present study was performed aiming to identify the ethical dilemmas human resource managers confront with in Iranian project-based organizations as well as to trace out the underlying causes. “Ethical dilemma” refers to a decision making situation in which ethical considerations render all the alternatives inapt, thence making the decision making process ethically complex. First of all, a theoretical framework was developed based on the preceding research; then, the study was further conducted utilizing a qualitative research method with an exploratory approach. The data were collected using in-depth interviews and analysed using the theme analysis method. The corresponding interviewees... 

Using Distributed leadership framework while studying the leadership phenomena in teams, especially in educational environment, has received more attention by scholars in these years. Although the results of these researches indicated positive consequences mostly, the need for exploratory studies to identify situational and contextual factors in distributed leadership effectiveness has been mentioned. In other words, it has been suggested that the effectiveness of distributed leadership in teams may be affected by situational and contextual factors. In the current multiple case study, after the initial study of leadership and its functions in some schools of Sharif University of Technology,... 

The influence mechanisms of executive/non-executive board compostion on board’s attribution style have been explored. In two case studies, I have examined boards’ causal interpretation about a critical incident which had a significant impact on firm performance. A qualitative research approach has been taken in the case studies. Data was gathered through semi-structured interviews with all board members and was analyzied with the theme analysis method. According to the results, board of directors’ collective attribution formation process can be devided into three stages of members’ expression of information and facts at board meetings, forming the individual judgements of members and at... 

Career Orientations or career choices, can be affected by internal and external factors. External factors are the environmental conditions that the reward and the attractiveness of selecting a career choice are dependent to them. Internal factors include the needs of oneself from his/her job, his/her beliefs and his/her skills and competencies about the job. In this research the internal antecedents of managerial and technical orientations between programmers have been identified. On the other hand the perception of people about the compensation system as an external factor which can affect the mentioned relationships, have been analyzed. It seems that this is the first research which career... 

Voluntary turnover has direct and indirect expenses for organizations and for this purpose; it has one of the richest literatures in academic works. Due to the especial role of knowledge workers in organizations, these expenses in knowledge-based organizations are more important and more costly than that of other organizations. One of the latest theories in the field of voluntarily turnover was introduced by Lee and Mitchell (1994) that was named “Unfolding Model of Turnover” to describe the process of decision of voluntary turnover. This theory is distinguished from its similar theories from two main aspects: First, they introduced new elements like shock. Second, they introduced... 

The measure of success in a company is determined by a high performing workforce that demonstrates the competencies necessary to drive the business success, while meeting the organization's strategic goals. This is where competency-based human resource management becomes important. The main factor contributing to the above noted area is the identification of core competencies. There has been a lot of research in this area during the past few years. Each research demonstrates an approach for the development of critical human resource competency models in an organization. In order to determine the foregoing competency model, the early studies in this area have been focused on the distinction... 

The goal of this study was to realize how the younger generation's perceptions of the authenticity of senior managers in knowledge-based firms affects the components of their employer brand on social media. For this reason, the perceptions of managers' authenticity from the perspective of the younger generation on Instagram, as an example of social networks, was investigated in the first stage of the study. The mechanisms of effectiveness of the identified components of authenticity are sought in the second step, in shaping the components of the manager's organization's employer brand. To attain the research goal, an exploratory approach was taken conducted, and a qualitative research method... 

This research explores the impacts of the telework initiated by the outbreak of COVID-19, which is being called “emergent telework” in this research, on psychological well-being of teleworkers. As for the nature of emergent telework which is a new and unique phenomenon, a qualitative research is conducted. In order to do so, 15 in-depth interviews were held with employees from product teams of 11 organizations, and the interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis. General conditions of teleworking are identified in two categories named as “not working adjacent to coworkers” and “being away from the physical environment of the workplace”. Emergent telework, alongside the general...