Sharif Digital Repository

Many Middle-East countries, like Iran, have dynamic banking industries and have observed merger and acquisitions (M&A) waves. M&A waves are usually defined in the developed world context and some of their main drivers were identified as: market timing, environment's shocks, merger manias, government regulation and regulatory, and technological changes. It has been discussed that merger waves and their reasons are among the ten most important unsolved mysteries in the field of finance (Brealey and Myers, 1991, p. 923), and as a result of this, it was not possible to completely clarify the reasons behind emerging M&A waves, especially in developing countries; for this reason in these... 

This chapter aims at pointing out that how mergers and acquisitions (M&As) as popular strategies which they are based on external growth approach have affected the performance of banks and entrepreneurial orientation (EO) in the context of Iranian financial sector. In this regard, it has been tried to investigate in what way EO moderates the relationships between the performance of banks in one hand, and M&As on the other hand. For this goal, 114 participants including the top and middle managers of the Iranian banks were chosen to be closely considered. The research is an applied research and a cross-correlation methodology has been used to spotlight on the probable relationships between EO... 

In this work, a more accurate prediction of liquid evaporation flux has been achieved. The statistical rate theory approach, which is recently introduced by Ward and Fang and exact estimation of vapor pressure in the layer adjacent to the liquid-vapor interface have been used for prediction of this flux. Firstly, the existence of an equilibrium layer adjacent to the liquid-vapor interface is considered and the vapor pressure in this layer and its thickness calculated. Subsequently, by using the Fick's second law, an appropriate vapor pressure expression for the pressure of equilibrium layer is derived and by this expression and the statistical rate theory approach, evaporation flux is... 

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) with rapid programming capability are highly desirable to realize flexible photonic networks. Phase change technology offers nonvolatile programmability in PICs. Here, an alternate way of controlling the light flow to interferometers, directional couplers, and phase shifters in the photonic integrated circuits, that is on-chip programmable metasurfaces is reported. Compact and low-loss on-chip metasurfaces can be demonstrated on a Sb2Se3 thin film using direct laser writing. On-chip focusing and splitting are realized with a single layer of the on-chip metasurface. Also, a more complex machine learning task of pattern recognition is accomplished by a... 

In this paper, we consider a special version of the well-known line-simplification problem for simplifying the boundary of a region illuminated by a point light source q, or its visibility polygon VP(q). In this simplification approach, we should take the position of q as an essential factor into account to determine the quality of the resulting simplification. For this purpose, we redefine the known distance- and area-distortion error criteria as the main simplification criteria to take into account the distance between the observer q and the boundary of VP(q). Based on this, we propose algorithms for simplifying VP(q). More precisely, we propose simplification algorithms of O(n2) and... 

Obtaining a reliable reservoir permeability map that is consistent with all available data is of great important for reservoir engineers. However, there is not enough core from existing wells to estimate the reservoir permeability directly but Well log data are more widely available. This study aims to model permeability within the reservoir while there is no enough data. In particular, we use artificial neural networks to estimate permeability using four input logs of sonic, gravity, porosity and neutron logs in six existing wells. In order to eliminate the correlated data, we have done Principal Component Analysis on selected input logs. Collocated cokriging is considered as a valuable... 

In this paper, we propose a method for maintaining the region visible from a moving point observer inside a planar scene. In this method, we check the observer position in discrete time-stamps to detect and apply changes to the visible or illuminated region of a moving point observer q, or VP(q). We efficiently maintain a list C(q) of edges in VP(q) which are subject to change during the motion. In each time-stamp that VP(q) is to be updated, we only refine and redraw the view against the edges of C(q) that indicate the positions of the visibility changes. We build an enriched representation of the visibility graph in a preprocessing step to apply the required updates on C(q) efficiently and... 

A new Zinc phosphating bath, which produces coatings at relatively lower temperatures within a reasonable time by using of chemical accelerators has been devised. Improvement of the bath performance by the addition of divalent cations like calcium, nickel has been studied. Bath formulation and operating conditions have been optimized by coating weight determinations. Stable samples of phosphating formulations with and without calcium and nickel salts were prepared and the structure and morphology of the phosphate coatings were determined by using X-ray diffraction (XRD) techniques, scanning electron microscopy. ASTMB117 salt spray test and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) were... 

In this paper, we consider the problem of computing the visibility of a query point inside polygons with holes. The goal is to perform this computation efficiently per query considering the cost of the preprocessing phase. Our algorithm is based on solutions in [A.L.P. Bose, J.I. Munro, Efficient visibility queries in simple polygons, Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications 23 (3) (2002) 313-335] and [M.T.B. Aronov, L. Guibas, L. Zhang, Visibility queries and maintenance in simple polygons, Discrete and Computational Geometry 27 (4) (2002) 461-483] proposed for simple polygons. In our solution, the preprocessing is done in time O( n3logn) to construct a data structure of size O( n3).... 

In this paper, we consider the problem of computing the visibility of a query point inside polygons with holes. The goal is to perform this computation efficiently per query with more cost in the preprocessing phase. Our algorithm is based on solutions in [13] and [2] proposed for simple polygons. In our solution, the preprocessing is done in time O(n3 log(n)) to construct a data structure of size O(n3). It is then possible to report the visibility polygon of any query point q in time O((1 + h′) log n + |V(q)|), in which n and h are the number of the vertices and holes of the polygon respectively, |V(q)| is the size of the visibility polygon of q, and h′ is an output and preprocessing... 

In a recently published article by Backer [Opt. Express 27(21), 30308 (2019).], a computational inverse design method is developed for designing optical systems composed of multiple metasurfaces. The forward propagation model used in this method was a discretized version of the angular spectrum propagator described by Goodman [Introduction to Fourier Optics, 1996]. However, slight modifications are necessary to increase the accuracy of this inverse design method. This comment examines the accuracy of the results obtained by the above-mentioned method by a full-wave electromagnetic solver and explains the reason of their difference. Thereafter, slight modifications to the method proposed by...