Sharif Digital Repository

With the increasing volume of data, the best approach for learning from this data is to exploit an online learning algorithm. Online ensemble methods take advantage of an ensemble of classifiers to predict labels of data. Prediction with expert advice is a well-studied problem in the online ensemble learning literature. The weighted majority and the randomized weighted majority (RWM) algorithms are two well-known solutions to this problem, aiming to converge to the best expert. Since among some expert, the best one does not necessarily have the minimum error in all regions of data space, defining specific regions and converging to the best expert in each of these regions will lead to a... 

Amphiphilic copolymers consist of hydrophilic and hydrophobic monomer units have attracted great technological attention recently, owing to their unique properties and their ability to stabilize various interfaces in aqueous systems. This paper presents a novel and facile approach to produce spherical polyacrylamide, polystyrene and hydrophobically modified polyacrylamide (HM-PAM), as one of the most important type of amphiphilic copolymers, using a continuous aerosol-photopolymerization for the first time. To this end, the monomer droplets were generated by an atomizer, then photopolymerization was initiated ‘‘in flight’’ by ultraviolet (UV) irradiation of the aerosol monomer droplets... 

High molecular weight polyacrylamide (PAM) nanoparticle dispersions are products with wide application possibilities, the most important of which is in petroleum industry such as drilling fluid and flooding agent in enhanced oil recovery. For that aim, it is necessary to achieve complete control of the final dispersion and polymer properties during the synthesis step. In this work, PAMs were synthesized by inverse emulsion polymerization of aqueous acrylamide solution in cyclohexane in the presence of emulsifier mixture of Span 20 and Span 80. We present a comprehensive study of the effects of variation of all important reaction conditions (agitation rate, reaction time and temperature,... 

Bag of words models for feature extraction have demonstrated top-notch performance in image classification. These representations are usually accompanied by a coding method. Recently, methods that code a descriptor giving regard to its nearby bases have proved efficacious. These methods take into account the nonlinear structure of descriptors, since local similarities are a good approximation of global similarities. However, they confine their usage of the global similarities to nearby bases. In this paper, we propose a coding scheme that brings into focus the manifold structure of descriptors, and devise a method to compute the global similarities of descriptors to the bases. Given a local... 

Tracking by detection is the topic of recent research that has received considerable attention in computer vision community. Mainly off-line classification methods have been used, however, they perform weakly in the case of appearance changes. Training theclassifier incrementally and in an online manner solves this problem, but nevertheless, raises drifting due to soft or hard labeling in the online adaptation. In this paper a novel semi-supervised online tracking algorithm based on manifold assumption is proposed. Target object and background patches lie near low-dimensional manifolds. This motivates us to make use of the intrinsic structure of data in classification, and benefit from the... 

Feature coding has received great attention in recent years as a building block of many image processing algorithms. In particular, the importance of the locality assumption in coding approaches has been studied in many previous works. We review this assumption and claim that using the similarity of data points to a more global set of anchor points does not necessarily weaken the coding method, as long as the underlying structure of the anchor points is considered. We propose to capture the underlying structure by assuming a random walker over the anchor points. We also show that our method is a fast approximation to the diffusion map kernel. Experiments on various data sets show that with a... 

This paper introduces a novel coding scheme based on the diffusion map framework. The idea is to run a t-step random walk on the data graph to capture the similarity of a data point to the codebook atoms. By doing this we exploit local similarities extracted from the data structure to obtain a global similarity which takes into account the nonlinear structure of the data. Unlike the locality-based and sparse coding methods, the proposed coding varies smoothly with respect to the underlying manifold. We extend the above transductive approach to an inductive variant which is of great interest for large scale datasets. We also present a method for codebook generation by coarse graining the data... 

With the decline in oil discoveries over recent decades, it is believed that enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technologies will play a key role to meet energy demand in the coming years. Polymer flooding is used commonly worldwide as an EOR process. In this work, we propose the synthesis of protected polyacrylamide (PAM) nanoparticles (PPNs) with a hydrophobic polystyrene (PSt) shell by one-pot two-step inverse emulsion polymerization, in which the PSt shell was created by surface polymerization. The shell protects the active PAM chains from premature degradation caused by the harsh environment in the reservoirs, controls the release of the chains as rheological modifiers, and additionally, it... 

Abstract original image Smart Enhanced Oil Recovery Process using Core–Shell Nanoparticles: The cover image denotes schematically the enhanced oil recovery process by flooding using an aqueous dispersion of core–shell nanoparticles made up of protected polyacrylamide nanostructures (PPNs). Y. Tamsilian and his colleagues at Sharif University of Technology (Iran) and the Institute for Polymer Material (POLYMAT, Spain) demonstrated the synthesis of polyacrylamide nanoparticles protected with a hydrophobic polystyrene shell by using a one-pot, two-step inverse emulsion polymerization technique, where the polystyrene shell was created by surface polymerization. The presence of the hydrophobic... 

Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) has become a topic of recent research that effectively addresses the problem of limited labeled data. Many SSL methods have been developed based on the manifold assumption, among them, the Local and Global Consistency (LGC) is a popular method. The problem with most of these algorithms, and in particular with LGC, is the fact that their naive implementations do not scale well to the size of data. Time and memory limitations are the major problems faced in large-scale problems. In this paper, we provide theoretical bounds on gradient descent, and to overcome the aforementioned problems, a new approximate Newton's method is proposed. Moreover, convergence... 

A novel intelligent semi-active control system for an eleven degrees of freedom passenger car's suspension system using magnetorheological (MR) damper with neuro-fuzzy (NF) control strategy to enhance desired suspension performance is proposed. In comparison with earlier studies, an improvement in problem modeling is made. The proposed method consists of two parts: a fuzzy control strategy to establish an efficient controller to improve ride comfort and road handling (RCH) and an inverse mapping model to estimate the force needed for a semi-active damper. The fuzzy logic rules are extracted based on Sugeno inference engine. The inverse mapping model is based on an artificial neural network... 

Using CNG as an additive for gasoline is a proper choice due to higher octane number of CNG enriched gasoline with respect to that of gasoline. As a result, it is possible to use gasoline with lower octane number in the engine. This would also mean the increase of compression ratio in SI engines resulting in higher performance and lower gasoline consumption. Over the years, the use of simulation codes to model the thermodynamic cycle of an internal combustion engine have developed tools for more efficient engine designs and fuel combustion. In this study, a thermodynamic cycle simulation of a conventional four-stroke spark-ignition engine has been developed. The model is used to study the... 

With the declining energy resources and increase of pollutant emissions, a great deal of efforts has been focused on the development of alternatives for fossil fuels. One of the promising alternative fuels to gasoline in the internal combustion engine is natural gas [1-5]. The application of natural gas in current internal combustion engines is realistic due to its many benefits. The higher thermal efficiency due to the higher octane value and lower exhaust emissions including CO2 as a result of the lower carbon to hydrogen ratio of the fuel are the two important feature of using CNG as an alternative fuel. It is well known that computer simulation codes are valuable economically as a cost... 

Gaining insight into possible vibratory responses of dynamical systems around their stable equilibria is an essential step, which must be taken before their design and application. The results of such a study can significantly help prevent instability in closed-loop stabilized systems by avoiding the excitation of the system in the neighborhood of its resonance. This paper investigates nonlinear oscillations of a rotary inverted pendulum (RIP) with a full-state feedback controller. Lagrange’s equations are employed to derive an accurate 2-DoF mathematical model, whose parameter values are extracted by both the measurement and 3D modeling of the real system components. Although the governing... 

A suction-controlled ring device has been developed to continuously measure the coefficient of lateral soil pressure in deformable unsaturated soil samples from the at-rest to the active condition under application of increasing vertical pressure and controlled matric suction. The device incorporates a thin aluminum specimen ring equipped with horizontal strain gages for recording the lateral soil strains. In addition, a sensor recording water volume changes is utilized to continuously monitor the degree of saturation of the soil sample during tests. The matric suction within the soil texture is controlled using the axis translation technique. In order to verify the performance of the ring... 

We introduce a new smooth, non-toxic, biocompatible method for cross-linking of gum tragacanth (GT), a polysaccharide of natural origin, in order to serve as a new supporting matrix for immobilization systems. The modified gum is used as a matrix for the catalysis of the conversion of benzyl penicillin to 6-aminopenicillanic acid (6-APA) by means of Escherichia coli ATCC11105 with penicillin G acylase (PGA) activity. The results show that GT beads can not only serve as a proper matrix for immobilization, but show enhanced hydrolysis rate and stability compared to other immobilization systems used for this reaction. This signifies the potential of GT as a biocompatible matrix for... 

The Class-E power amplifier has been widely studied and formulated in the literature. Although the majority of reported inductive coupling wireless power transfer (WPT) systems use a class-E power amplifier for driving the primary coil, still there is a lack of a comprehensive study on class-E circuit dedicated to WPT, providing a set of closed form design equations for proper class-E operation. This paper presents the required design equations needed to design a 'true' class-E circuit for WPT applications. Equations for the series-tuned secondary coil WPT system are presented, as well as two different design procedures for the parallel-tuned secondary coil. The derived equations have been... 

Pole Side Impact Tes is one out of three crash tests described by Euro NCAP standard for star rating of a vehicle and is required for assessing the Adult Occupant Protection. In this paper the goal is to determine the crashworthiness of side doors and B pillar in a Pole Side Impact Test based on Euro New Car Assessment Program (Euro-NCAP) using computer and simulation method. In this matter, a vehicle model has been prepared and meshed using Hypermesh and CATIA. The velocity of 29 km/h has been assigned to the vehicle which was on top of a cart while the pole has been assigned as a rigid static object based on Euro NCAP requirements specifically. Results show that different amounts of energy...