Sharif Digital Repository

Male infertility is mostly related to semen and spermatozoa, and any diagnosis or treatment requires the investigation of the motility patterns of spermatozoa. The movements of spermatozoa are fast and involve collision and occlusion with each other. In order to extract the motility patterns of spermatozoa, multi-target tracking (MTT) of spermatozoa is necessary. One of the most important steps of MTT is data association, in which the newly arrived observations are used to update the previous tracks. Dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) is a powerful tool for modeling and solving various types of problems such as tracking and classification. There can also be a hybrid-DBN (HDBN), in which both... 

A series of polyurethane elastomers (PUEs) based on 4,4′-cyclohexamethylene diisocyanate (H12MDI)/1,2-ethanediol as hard segment with the soft segments having different molecular weights of polycaprolactone diols, were effectively polymerized by two step technique. The structural characterization was performed by FT-IR spectroscopy. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) technique was used to study the crystallinity and hydrophilicity of the prepared polymer films. It was found that crystallinity and hydrophilicity increased with increasing the chain length of soft segments. The effect of molecular weight of polyols on the contact angle, water absorption (%) and swelling behavior of the synthesized... 

We consider the problem of interference management in wireless cellular networks with caches at both base stations and receivers, and we characterize the degrees of freedom (DoFs) per cell to within an additive gap of (1/3) and a multiplicative gap of 2 for all system parameters, under one-shot linear schemes. Our result indicates that the one-shot linear DoF per cell scales linearly with the total amount of cache available in the cell, i.e., the sum of the caches at the central base station and all the receivers within the cell, resembling a similar phenomenon previously observed for the case of fully connected wireless networks. To establish the result, we propose a decentralized and... 

How can we optimally trade extra computing power to reduce the communication load in distributed computing? We answer this question by characterizing a fundamental tradeoff between computation and communication in distributed computing, i.e., the two are inversely proportional to each other. More specifically, a general distributed computing framework, motivated by commonly used structures like MapReduce, is considered, where the overall computation is decomposed into computing a set of “Map” and “Reduce” functions distributedly across multiple computing nodes. A coded scheme, named “coded distributed computing” (CDC), is proposed to demonstrate that increasing the computation load of the... 

In this paper, a decentralized controller for trajectory tracking of modular and reconfigurable robot manipulators is developed. The proposed control scheme uses joint-torque sensory feedback; also sliding mode control is employed to make both position and velocity tracking errors of robot manipulators globally converging to zero. Proposed scheme also guarantees that all signals in closed-loop systems will be bounded. In contrast to some of prior works in this scheme, each controller uses a smooth law to achieve its purposes. In this method, each controller uses only local information for producing control law hence separated controller can be used to control each module of manipulator and... 

The most important disadvantage of swinging interferometers is that the optical path difference created in them is a nonlinear function of the rotation angle. In this paper, two new swinging interferometers are presented which have good linearity and provide a larger path difference in response to the rotation angle compared to other interferometers. This makes them suitable for applications such as high-resolution spectroscopy, and precision micro and nanopositioning. In one of these two interferometers, the optical path difference is created by rotation of a system composed of four mirrors, and in the other one it is created by rotation of a system consisting of two mirrors. They are not... 

Palm oil (PO) and sunflower oil (SFO) blends with varying proportions were subjected to enzymatic interesterification (EIE) using a 1,3-specific immobilised lipase. The interesterified blends were evaluated for their slip melting point (SMP), solid fat content (SFC) at 10-40°C, p-anisidine value, peroxide value, free fatty acids (FFA), induction period of oxidation at 110°C (IP110) and composition of fatty acids by gas chromatography. Under EIE treatment, the blends of PO and SFO in different proportions (20:80, 40:60, 50:50, 60:40 and 80:20) had saturated and unsaturated fatty acid content in the range of 37.6-52.0% and 48.0-62.4%, respectively. The blends showed a considerable reduction in... 

Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA), Glycerol (G) and sunflower oil blends with varying concentration were subjected to enzymatic esterification using a 1, 3-specific immobilized lipase. CLA was used as acyl due to its purported health benefits. The transesterified lipids were evaluated for free fatty acids (FFA) and composition of fatty acids by gas chromatography. Lipozyme RM IM is preferred for enzymatic esterification because of more CLA incorporation and less free fatty acids at the end of reaction than Lipozyme TL IM. Response surface methodology (RSM) was used to determine the effects of three variables Glycerol concentration, reaction temperature, and amount of enzyme on the lipase... 

Rolling-element bearing (REB) failure is one of the general damages in rotating machinery. In this manner, the correct prediction of remaining useful life (RUL) of REB is a crucial challenge to move forward the unwavering quality of the machines. One of the main difficulties in implementing data-driven methods for RUL prediction is to choose proper features that represent real damage progression. In this article, by using the outcomes of frequency analysis through the Envelope method, the initiated/existed defects on the ball bearings are identified. Also, new features based on developing faults of ball bearings is recommended to estimate RUL. Early-stage faults in ball bearings usually... 

The biped walking robot demonstrates a stable limit cycle on shallow slopes. In previous researches, this passive gait was shown to be sensitive to ground slope and initial conditions. In this paper, we discuss the feedback stabilization of a biped robot by the "energy shaping" technique. Two designs are proposed to reduce the sensitivity of the biped walking robot to slope and initial conditions. In the first design, a moving mass actuator is located on each link of the robot. The actuators are used to shape the potential energy of the biped robot so that it tracks the potential energy of a known passive gait of a similar biped robot on a different slope. Although the method is applied to a... 

The spatiotemporal dynamic of salinity concentration (SC) in saline lakes is strongly dependent on the rate of water flow into the lake, water circulation, wind speed, evaporation rate, and the phenomenon of salt precipitation and dissolution. Although in-situ observations most reliably quantify water quality metrics, the spatiotemporal distribution of such data are typically limited and cannot be readily extrapolated for either long-term projections or extensive areas. Alternatively, remotely sensed imagery has facilitated less expensive and a stronger ability to estimate water quality over a wide range of spatiotemporal resolutions. This study introduces an adaptive learning model that... 

The interaction between a lake and groundwater has important implications to the quantity and quality of water in both environments. Quantification of lake-groundwater interaction (LGI) has been challenging in regions with limited in-situ data. LGI can be quantified by physically-based models, direct measurement of seepage, measurements of conservative chemical or isotopic tracers, and lake water balance. Despite the accuracy of the methods based on hydrochemical or isotopic measurements and analysis, they require extensive field data that are costly to collect in large lakes. Instead, the data required to quantify LGI by the lake water budget method can be obtained via typical ground... 

The rapid shrinkage of Lake Urmia over the past two decades has raised serious environmental concerns. Several restoration plans have been proposed to reduce agricultural water consumption to supply a remarkable fraction of the lake's environmental flow requirement. However, an accurate and realistic evaluation of the effectiveness of these plans in reducing agricultural water consumption across the basin is still poorly understood. This study assessed the water-saving potential of agricultural alteration in a snow-dominated catchment in the Lake Urmia Basin. In particular, we explored the impact of crop pattern alteration via reducing the cultivation area and employing different irrigation...