Sharif Digital Repository

The two central topics of information theory are the compression and the transmission of data. Shannon, in his seminal work, formalized both these problems and determined their fundamental limits. Since then the main goal of coding theory has been to find practical schemes that approach these limits.Polar codes, recently invented by Arıkan, are the first practical codes that are known to achieve the capacity for a large class of channels. Their code construction is based on a phenomenon called “channel polarization”.
Since the performance of polar code degrades when the block length is small, several kinds of Reed – Solomon concatenation is considered in order to improve the... 

Every day thousands of questions and answers are posted on CQA websites. Stack Overflow is known as one of the most famous CQA websites in the field of programming. Asking high-quality questions on this website is one of the significant challenges that users face, leading to negative experiences in some cases. In this research history of questions, answers, and post-edits are studied to get insights for predicting questions’ quality. There is a new approach proposed that takes both post scores, and their edits into account to predict their quality. The questions edits that are studied are the one that happened before getting an accepted answer. Furthermore, it is shown that predicting these... 

In this thesis, a one-dimensional simulation, developed in previous studies, is utilized to study the stability phenomenon in axial compressors of gas turbine engines. The transient and dynamic operation of the axial compressor is determined by solving the conservation equations, expressed as one dimensional and time dependent Euler equations with related turbomachinery source terms. As known, stall and surge are one of the most destructive dynamic phenomenon in gas turbine engine compression systems starting with a flow separation. This occurrence is investigated in detail. In general, while choking phenomenon may occur during engine startup in the first stages, stall... 

In this research, a new method is proposed for constructing concrete structures with complex geometry, including topology-optimized concrete dams on a small scale. According to global statistics, concrete is the most consumed material in the world after water, and its production process causes a lot of damage to the environment. One of the best ways to reduce concrete consumption is to use tools such as topology optimization to design concrete structures. Nevertheless, few research has been done in the field of topology optimization of concrete dams, one of the important reasons for which is the difficulty of building physical model to perform physical tests, validating numerical models, and... 

Little research has been conducted on the topic of water resources management in case of deep uncertainty. It is vital for the management method to be upgraded in order to accompany future changes. The purpose of this study is to inspect some viable scenarios and deriving proper reservoir management solutions in case of deep uncertainty. This is important due to the fact that future changes are often not considered when water resources structured are being designed. In the past, some researches in this field of study were done; For instance, the effects of climate change on reservoirs have been assessed. Also methods for coming up with scenarios have been proposed, most of which are based on... 

Nowadays, advanced and inexpensive pre-clinical methods for investigating the effects of anti-cancer drugs are expanding. One of the latest three-dimensional laboratory modeling for evaluating the effects of drugs is the use of tumor-on-chip technology, which actually models the physiological system of the body through three-dimensional scaffolds, multicellular cultures, and shaped vascular systems. In this study, three-dimensional culture of cancer cells was performed in the form of spheroids. A chip of U-shaped microstructures with and without gaps was used to trap cells and form cancer spheroids. We simulated the simultaneous effect of drug and oxygen concentration distribution inside the... 

Ejtehadi, M. R. (Mohammad Reza)All cells store their hereditary information in the same linear chemical code, DNA molecule. These information organize all activities of the cell. Therefore, studying various properties of DNA is a big step toward understanding life. Physicists are interested in elastic properties of DNA molecule. DNA is somehow a chain of successive atoms that have been arranged in a helical ladder shape. DNA is a stiff polymer so one has to use a large amount of energy to bend it. Interestingly, in most of the natural cases, DNA is highly packed into spaces that are much smaller that its total length. Cell’s nucleus and viral capsids are some examples. Virus maybe the... 

Network design problem has been, and is, an important problem in transportation. Network design based on different objectives affects network's performance in different dimensions, so it is crucial to define a good objective for the network design problem that improves the network's performance in more than one aspect. The purpose of this study is to obtain the differences between the two network design problems, one based on resiliency, and the other based on consumer surplus.Network design problem based on consumer surplus minimizes the total travel time for the users in the network. Network design problem based on resiliency is defined as: (1) before the incident, (2) after the incident... 

Cardiovascular diseases are among the leading causes of death worldwide. For instance, in 2015, almost 31% of the world’s mortality rate was due to these causes. One of these diseases is cardiac coronary vessels’ occlusion which leads to the insufficient blood supply to the heart tissue and cardiomyocytes death after Myocardial Infarction (MI). After MI, a hierarchy of events in the heart tissue changes heart muscle and forms cardiac fibrosis. This fibrotic tissue does not have the native one’s properties and function, so it will cause cardiac arrest and patient death. Therefore, it is obvious that vascular network plays a crucial role in the heart function. The importance of cardiac... 

This study has focused on the important problem of landing on a planet as an important current and future space mission. In this regard, dynamics modeling and integrated state estimation and control problems have been investigated in different views. To this aim, first a novel concurrent representation for translational and rotational kinematics has been developed based on the extension of modified Rodrigues parameters to dual space. This parameter set, called dual modified Rodrigues parameters (DMRP), is then utilized to establish an integrated roto-translational dynamic. The proposed DMRP-based kinematics and dynamics have been verified via comparison to traditional methods of... 

This thesis addresses the problem of optimal distributed control of unknown interconnected systems. In order to deal with this problem, a data-driven learning framework for finding the optimal centralized and the suboptimal distributed controllers has been developed via convex optimization.First of all, the linear quadratic regulation (LQR) problem is formulated into a nonconvex optimization problem. Using Lagrangian duality theories, a semidefinite program is then developed that requires information about the system dynamics. It is shown that the optimal solution to this problem is independent of the initial conditions and represents the Q-function, an important concept in reinforcement... 

Accurate and fast attitude estimation of a rigid body plays an essential role in the performance of a vehicle’s control system, especially aerospace vehicles. Ample works have been done to increase the accuracy and speed of the attitude estimation process, but all have been developed according to a model-based approach. This approach assumes that the torques acting on the body have a known dynamical model that is used for the attitude estimation. The purpose of the present research is to estimate the attitude via a model-free approach, i. e. dynamics of the torques acting on the body are no longer assumed to be known, and its learning is the next step. Thus, the problem formulation of this... 

This thesis presents a new approach to design structural output feedback controllers with stabilization and pole-placement at desired points on the S plane. It is assumed that the linear time-invariant system has no fixed mode corresponding to the specified control structure, outside the desired region of the closed-loop poles, such that the structural controller design problem is theoretically feasible. To this end, the structural output controller design problem is first transformed into a structurally equivalent problem based on the solution of a set of discrete linear programs. Then, by using the resultant structure, a new method is proposed for designing static and dynamic control loops... 

Modeling and performance evaluation of the real time distributed systems is a significant problem. Stochastic activity network is one of the high level models used for this purpose. This network is an extension of generalized stochastic Petri net which is more powerful and flexible than other Petri net extensions. Checking the satisfiability of properties such as performance, dependability and user's expected properties is considerable in these models. Thus, using the approaches and generating modeling and model checking tools with the mentioned purpose is attractive. A model checker automatically checks the correctness of the system behaviors as properties against the model by getting the... 

The main topic of this research is the navigation and control of a free-flying satellite with a robot manipulator while transferring and placing cargo on a space station. After connecting the cargo module, astronauts and robots need to deliver the available loads to the desired modules in a space station. Capturing an object or cargo is a critical issue studied extensively so far. However, delivery and placing of the cargo at the target point have not been investigated yet, to the best of the author’s knowledge; hence, this is a primary motivation for conducting the proposed research. After capturing the payload, the position and attitude of the manipulator with respect to the station’s... 

Understanding biological systems requires extensive knowledge of individual parameters, and to study the processes of cell differentiation and cell behavior, a suitable environment must be created with the physiological conditions of the human body. For this purpose, with the knowledge of microfluidics, a microenvironment can be provided to study the behavior of cells on a small scale. The use of bone tissue model microfluidic chips is an alternative and new method in which it is possible to study the behavior of cells to differentiate into bone and to examine the toxicity of drugs, which in itself can help in the effective and successful treatment of these cases show. Therefore, in this... 

Prevalent deployment of Distributed Energy Resources(DERs) in the demand side of electrical energy grids has several advantages such as greenhouse gases emission reduction, mitigation of power losses in the distribution grids and abatement of the dependency on the wholesale generation companies. At the same time, it paves the way for the advent of local interactive energy trading frameworks. In the following thesis, a distributed data-driven algorithm is developed for market-clearing in a community-based local energy market. The social welfare maximization is considered as the objective of the energy trading. The production and demand of electricity are the decision variables of sellers and... 

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) currently remains a considerable challenge for clinical treatments. CVDs account for N17.5 million deaths per year and will predictably increase to 23.6 million by 2030. The main purpose is to create human model systems to study the effect of disease mutations or drug treatment on the heart. In addition, engineered cardiac tissues are considered promising candidates to be transplanted to improve the function of diseased hearts. For engineered active tissues/organs, 3D bioprinting can fabricate complex tissue architecture with a spatiotemporal distribution of bioactive substances (cells, growth factors, and others) to better guide tissue regeneration. However,... 

Human action recognition is one of the computer vision branches. Video surveillance and human-computer interaction is among its modern applications. The main goal of this subject is to label RGB-D videos which are captured from acting human. Therefore, labeling the input videos among pre-learned action is called as action recognition.The action recognition problem consists of two primary parts. The first part is selecting a suitable descriptor to describe input videos, and the other part is the way that the system has been learned based on the learning action data. The main goal of this research title is to propose a method for recognizing each action video (that is acted by human and...