Sharif Digital Repository

Swarm robotics has attracted a lot of researches in recent decades due to its ability to overcome complexities despite of simple hardware used in each member of swarm. Developing control algorithms which can address connection, consensus and average consensus, position control, formation and swarm movement, is one of the main problems in the study of multi-agent systems and swarm robotics. Even though such methods have been developed and used by researchers for a few years, theoretical and operational issues still exist in the use of robotic swarms. For example, in leader-follower method, presence of repellent coordinator agent results in disruption in movement of other agents. Also... 

The present study is concerned with the development of a rubric which can help to have an objective, valid, and reliable assessment of short stories and novels written by creative writing students. The 30 participants of the study who were literature and creative writing experts took part in rubric development, validation, and reliability estimation. Review of the related literature, as well as the administration of a Likert scale questionnaire and a series of unstructured interviews led to the identification of ten elements which were used to construct the first version of the creative writing rubric. To ensure validity of the developed rubric, 18 literature and creative writing experts... 

Teaching a foreign language and its culture implicitly might result in internalizing the foreign culture and identity (Brown, 2001). This might consequently cause cultural identity crisis and loss in a broader sense. As provided by Eslami Nodooshan (1998), considering the importance of cultural awareness raised through cultural studies and its influence on language policy and accordingly language classes provided the ground for this study to investigate the components of Iranian cultural identity, the degree of Iranian EFL teachers’ cultural identity, and the statistically significant difference between the Iranian EFL teachers’ cultural identity with different demographic characteristics.... 

In the present era, data and its impressive access is considered to be one of the key elements in development, in a way that all social, economic process, severly require information. Today knowledge is the most important tool in competition of present and future markets. Implementation of knowledge management should be accomplished in a step by step process. One of the main goals of implementing knowledge management is increasing of the organizational productivity. This study has a qualitative approach and the method is based on a case study. Data has been collected by questionnaires. Due to this fact, knowledge management should be applied according to organizational productivity. Among... 

The debate over the nature of perceptual states has been a significant part of the literature of philosophy of the mind during the past two decades. John Campbell's philosophical works on metaphysics and epistemology of sensory perception, according to many of his followers and critics, are among the most coherent contemporary philosophical works with recent advances in cognitive science. His research on the relationship between attention, reference, knowledge and spatial representations is to a large extent supported by scientific ideas in empirical psychology, and it can be said that most of his work is devoted to analyzing and solving the theoretical complexities deriving from empirical... 

This study was a mixed-method research into the impact of emotions on the professional identities of teachers. The researcher followed Zembylas (2005a, 2005b) in conducting this study following the argument that politics and disciplinary power affect every aspect of teachers` life, hence their emotions and professional identities. Foucault (1975, 1984) was the source of theoretical underpinning in this study. The researcher used an open written interview, an attitudinal questionnaire, and a written narrative inquiry to collect the required data. Ten English language teachers (8 English Institute teachers, 2 public school teachers) took part in the first phase. One-hundred teachers from both... 

Today with the deployment of cloud computing and web applications; We need to have powerful datacenters with provisioning high bandwidth. Current data centers with electronic network interconnects, using excessive power to provisioning requisite bandwidth. Nevertheless, interconnecting networks in data centers isn’t in maximum efficiency and many components of them aren't used efficiently. So it is necessary to use an optical network with dynamic provisioning variable bandwidth and energy management. In this approach, our proposed architecture is designing topology with adopting dynamically for energy management in optical interconnect networks in data centers. To achieve this we can study... 

It has been reported that in some organizations despite delegation according to its concept, some of the organization members don’t have an internal motivation to use the autonomy that has been delegated to them. This problem might have different aspects. From the self-determination theory perspective, this might be because of unsatisfied basic needs of the person. For example, if all options the person has, are desirable or all of the options are undesirable and the person can’t choose between them. This might result in unsatisfied basic needs of the person. Due to these conditions, there is a probability that she won’t have an internal motivation to use autonomy. In some researches, it has... 

Academic writing, being an essential part of today's academic milieu, is not mere production of different texts but is also inextricably intertwined with issues related to authorial presence and interaction. Drawing on a corpus-based approach, this study investigated how various factors namely, disciplinary conventions, writers' culture, and types of journals in which authors publish could exert influence on the use of stance and engagement markers (Hyland, 2005a) in the genre of research articles. The main corpus of this study consisted of three different sub-corpora including locally oriented corpus, internationally oriented corpus, and Native English-Speaking corpus in each of which there... 

Magnetic gels and ferrogels are smart composite materials made by combining magnetic particles in a polymer matrix. These materials have been considered due to their special properties such as deformation and change of mechanical properties in the presence of external magnetic field. Having polymer properties along with the magnetic properties of metals, have led these materials to many uses such as drug delivery and artificial muscles. The increasing use of these materials has led researchers to continue research in the field of modeling ferrogels. Due to the porous nature of ferrogels, the ability to absorb a lot of liquid and their large deformations in the magnetic field, modeling of... 

The World Health Organization's annual statistics show that 83% of wounds are caused by bacterial infections. Diabetic ulcers affect approximately 28 million people worldwide. The use of antibacterial dressings can help control infections. Recent studies have found that electrical stimulation can accelerate wound healing. However, there is still a need for interventions that speed up epithelial tissue formation. New dressings with zinc and silver particles that have electrical activity are being developed, but research on these methods is limited. Zinc oxide nanoparticles have been used as antibacterial agents due to their unique surface properties. This research aims to use these... 

Modelling passengers’ itinerary choice behaviour is valuable to understand the increasingly competitive airline market and predicting air travel demand. Research in the choice behaviour of air travellers has evolved to include an analytical focus on variation in the sensitivities of travellers to factors influencing itinerary choice. That is, some choice studies have moved beyond a focus on assumed representative, mean-level sensitivities toward a goal of representing the distribution of preferences across a sample. An important issue that remains is whether the insight gained in previous studies, which focussed on preferences in mature markets with relatively high per-capita rates of air...