Sharif Digital Repository

Considering finish ability of fossil fuels and their polluting effects accordingly a need of renewable energies is felt. Among these clean energies biomass considering economical and environmental advantages is one of bests. Therefore a sufficient energy¬-¬efficient process with a good efficiency is needed. In this study an analysis of different mechanism to produce bioethanol from biomass has been done. According to the results from simulation the recovery step of bioethanol from the existing dilute solution from fermentation consumes the most energy in the process. Therefore substituting saline extractive column can result in saving energy. Finally in order to get more accurate result the... 

Microalgae is a major problem in water resources due to its adverse influence on water treatment process and water quality like color, odor and taste. In addition microalgae removal is an important process in food and pharmacy industry. Electrocoagulation is a potential method for microalgae removal. Another method for microalgae recovery is membrane treatment. This study is focusing on using both methods separately and simultaneously. To achieve this, the removal of Chlorella Vulgaris, a fresh water microalgae, was used in experiments. In first phase the experiments were solely on electrocoagulation and the effect of several parameters including current density, electrocoagulation duration,... 

Recently, the computational algorithms underlying in the nervous system of vertebrates have been attracting scientists and engineers. Therefore, a number of artificial learning methods are proposed for mathematical interpretation of these algorithms. In this thesis, by investigating the latest findings about the nervous system, and the motor system in particular, a novel machine learning scheme inspired by human motor learning is proposed. Basic theoretical aspects of this method in conjunction with some of state-of-theart artificial learning methods are discussed. Finally, this method is evaluated in a variety of engineering problems ranging from curve fitting and function approximation to... 

How the human nervous system works is one of the most important topics in science and in this topic providing a model of it is scientists' main concern. The human brain that has been formed from a large number of nerve cells lets it do complex computations. The structure of cognition, memorizing and processing which are some of human features are being studied in many fields of science named "brain and cognitive science".
In this study, we will point to modeling of one of the human cognitive phenomena (decision making in problem solving). In this modeling, we aim to connect the microscopic and macroscopic levels of the nervous system to each other.
First, we will give an introduction... 

According to needs for high quality pictures with high compression, in variety of applications such as Satellite communications, in this thesis some parts of JPEG2000 standard with computation and time complexity, have been implemented on FPGA. This parts are:
1- Two dimensional Discrete wavelet transform (2D-DWT)
2- Bit Plan Coding
3- Context-based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (MQ-Coder)
Each of these parts is implemented on basis of the best architectures in papers with some improvement on its hardware; and the results are compared with other similar works. Other parts, such as “Packet Creation” that are intrinsically software-based, are not implemented and it is... 

This study analyzes determinants of customers’ switching intentions. The context of this study is service area and we have studied customers’ behavior of internet service providers. In this research we focus both on transactional and relational variables. We have tried to clarify the role of consumers’ commitment on their intentions to switch. Drawing from literature and based on previous service switching research we have developed a switching model. This includes two component of customer commitment and the antecedents of commitment. We have developed our hypothesis according to this model and the literature review. The survey was administered to ADSL internet home users. A sample of 130... 

Customer needs of Iran Print Industry have permanently been a secret for all producers, print centers and even many of the customers themselves. This research tries to find the relationship gaps between Iran Print Industry and its Individual /Industrial Customers, by identifying their needs. This will give recommendations on how manufacturers can increase their customers' satisfaction by providing them with what they need. Also it helps find the customers` satisfaction coefficient of the needs, which is a good guide for Customer Relationship Management in this industry.Therefore, manufacturers can spot these results by providing appropriate machines which can achieve these goals and offer... 

Based on symbolic theories BRANDS have personalities and according to this, brands like human beings have personality and stable behaviors in a period of time. Customers can imagine brands like a live creature according to different causes such as marketing communications, social responsibility of brand, CEO behaviors, clients, customers, etc. “BRAND PERSONALITY” is an interesting concept in world of marketing and it is one of the most important part of the brand identity. Brand personality makes people think at “brands” as friends. We consider “personality” as a perception of knowing, feelings and motivations that make people reactions toward their environment. Consuming is a way of... 

Marketing nowadays is an extremely dynamic field in which brand plays a critical role. Although comparing to developed countries, marketing is not a very old science area in Iran, but in the past decade brand concept has become more and more important among marketing managers of domestic industries. Nevertheless, there is no scientific approach to manage this critical concept, i.e. brand among local companies.Since managing any concept requires measuring it, there have been many global research conducted in the past 4 decades in order to construct a measurement framework to evaluate brand equity. But in Iran however, there is a big gap in this area and brands are evaluated by marketing... 

One of the subjects that have been title for many research proposals in recent years is application of Nano Zero Valent Iron (NZVI) particles in contaminant removal from groundwater sources. Despite many studies being done, field application of this particles in a practical scale is not widespread yet which is due to many challenges like rapid settlement of particles or their unclear behavior through field application. The main purpose of this thesis in the first place is to find a practical and productive method for stabilization of particles and enhancement of their transport properties. To reach this goal, application of a natural polymer like starch has been studied as a solution. To... 

This thesis seeks to answer the following research questions: 1-How customers’ engagement with social media activation campaigns is conceptualized and operationalized? 2- What are the main antecedents of customers’ engagement with such campaigns? 3-How customers’ engagement with these campaigns affects brand image? The first research question is addressed in the first section of this research and includes five phases. Using the conceptualization of engagement in psychology, marketing, information systems, and some other fields, Phase 1 conceptualizes customers’ engagement with social media activation campaigns. This phase offers a comprehensive definition of this construct and discuss the... 

Brand perceptual map is a practical tool for visualizing the position of a brand and its competitors in the mind of customers. In traditional ways of building a brand perceptual map, the researcher identifies important aspects of the product and designs a questionnaire to measure the scores of different brands to gather the required information from users. With the increasing development of online shopping, users have been voluntarily registering their reviews in online shops, in a free and unstructured manner, and have created valuable data sources in these online stores. Due to the large size of registered reviews, processing them requires the use of automated methods in computers. In... 

One way for businesses to grow and compete, in any age (especially the digital age), is to create a Brand Relevance through creating or finding, and then owning new categories or subcategories. In this way, instead of beating competitors; they become irrelevant by enticing customers to buy a new category or subcategory for which other alternative brands are not considered relevant. Firms traditionally rely on interviews and focus groups to identify these subcategories and customer needs. Nowadays, with the growth of social media, user-generated content (UGC) is also a good alternative source. However, Due to the large size of UGC and the non-informative or repetitive data it contains,... 

Nowadays, different technologies help businesses in their various processes, especially marketing, so that their activities can be carried out in a better way.One of the emerging technologies that has come to the attention of retailers in recent years is augmented reality. With the help of this technology and only with a smartphone, a product can be viewed virtually and three-dimensionally in real space. There have been several studies on the effect of augmented reality technology on marketing processes and customers' shopping experience. Most of these studies have focused on the online shopping experience. This study examines how augmented reality technology, allows buyers to have more... 

In the past two decades, there have been significant advancements in responsible management education at the international level. These developments have led to new discourses and pathways in the field of management education and research. Responsible Management Education (RME) involves considering perspectives related to the responsibilities of enterprises, the social impacts of private sector activities on society, attention to the environment and sustainable development, and business ethics in the curriculum of business schools. Business schools worldwide have initiated numerous programs, studies, initiatives, lessons, and events to address social issues, responsible management, and... 

The main idea in this project is investigation of multidimensional recording brain signal (ECoG) for estimation of 3D arm trajectory. First we introduce a general structure with variable blocks, in this structure we have many ways to estimate hand trajectory and obtain different result. By statistical test we find the best state of this structure and apply it on other dtae set trials. Electrocorticography (ECoG) has seen recent use in this regard because it offers a higher spatiotemporal resolution than non-invasive EEG and is less invasive than intracortical microelectrodes and have been shown to contain reliable information about the direction of arm Trajectory and movements. We using... 

Parkinson's disease is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system. The motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease result from the death of dopamine-generating cells in the substantia nigra. The cause of this cell death is unknown. Early in the course of the disease, the most obvious symptoms are movement-related. Some of the symptoms are: shaking, rigidity, slowness of movement and difficulty with walking and gait. Modern treatments are effective at managing the early motor symptoms of the disease, mainly through the use of levodopa and dopamine agonists. As the disease progresses these drugs eventually become ineffective and produce a complication called dyskinesia, marked by... 

Face recognition is one of the best biometrics in computer vision. Although researchers introduced this method many years ago, the most important improvement has occurred in the biometrics last decade. Face recognition was employed in areas such as passport checking, security issues and identification. It facilitates our daily life as we use it in our mobile phones and computers for unlocking our devices. Many approaches were employed in the face recognition applications. Some of them were single-modal like PCA, ICA and LDA and some others were multimodal like Visual + 3D or 3D + IR. Still, most of Face recognition methods suffer from environment changes like variations in illumination and... 

Reliable communication has become very crucial in the transmission applications. Hence, to design hardware to handle reliability is the most important part of communication. In this work, we propose a new secured ALU (Arithmetic and Logic Unit) against fault attacks that is used in ARM processor which can correct any 5-bit error in any position of 32-bit input registers of ALU. We also designed a BCH (Bose, Chaudhuri, and Hocquenghem) codec (encoder, decoder) using the prototyping FPGA. Further, in this thesis we designed (63, 36) the BCH encoding and decoding system to tolerate the 5-bit faults. The codec system and ALU system are based on using Verilog description language. Since...