Sharif Digital Repository

By the immense growth of the Web-Based Social Networks (WBSNs), the role of trust in connecting people together through WBSNs is getting more important than ever. In other words, since the probability of malicious behavior in WBSNs is increasing, it is necessary to evaluate the reliability of a person before trying to communicate with. Hence, it is desirable to find out how much a person should trust another one in a network. The approach to answer this question is usually called trust inference. In this paper, we propose a new trust inference algorithm (Called RN-Trust) based on the resistive networks concept. The algorithm, in addition to being simple, resolves some problems of previously... 

This study presents a new method called FCSMM (Fuzzy Customer Satisfaction Measurement Method) for measuring individual customer satisfaction using a fuzzy inference system. The main advantage of this method is its simplification in evaluation of Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) based on simple linguistic statements collected from experienced people. In contrast with assumptions used in other methods such as linear regression principles and predefined criteria weights, the aforementioned statements form the FCSMM computational structure. Since the drivers of satisfaction and dissatisfaction and performance indexes can be simultaneously applied, concurrent direct and indirect customer... 

This paper introduces a novel framework for modeling temporal events with complex longitudinal dependency that are generated by dependent sources. This framework takes advantage of multidimensional point processes for modeling time of events. The intensity function of the proposed process is a mixture of intensities, and its complexity grows with the complexity of temporal patterns of data. Moreover, it utilizes a hierarchical dependent nonparametric approach to model marks of events. These capabilities allow the proposed model to adapt its temporal and topical complexity according to the complexity of data, which makes it a suitable candidate for real world scenarios. An online inference... 

One of the problems in Bayesian inference is the prior selection. We can categorize different methods for selecting prior into two main groups: informative and non-informative. Here, we have considered an informative method called filters random filed and minimax entropy (FRAME). Despite of its theoretical interest, that method introduces a huge amount of computational burden, which makes it very unsuitable for real-time applications. The main critical point of the method is its parameter estimation part, which plays a major role in its very low speed. In this paper, we have introduced a fast method for parameter estimation to fasten the FRAME approach. Although the kernel of our approach is... 

Social networks let the people find and know other people and benefit form their information. Semantic Web standard ontologies support social network sites for making use of other social networks information and hence help their expansion and unification, making them a huge social network. As social networks are public virtual social places much information may exist in them that may not be trustworthy to all. A mechanism in needed to rate coming news, reviews and opinions about a definite subject from users, according to each user preference. There should be a feature for users to specify how much they trust a friend and a mechanism to infer the trust from one user to another that is not... 

The Markov decision process is one of the most common probabilistic prediction models used in infrastructure management. When existing data are insufficient, expert knowledge is commonly used to derive a Markovian transition probability matrix. Eventually, every pavement management system will progress to a level at which inspection measurements from the network will be organized into a database to be used for performance prediction. The best way to use this body of data to improve the initially developed transition probability matrix is to combine prior expert knowledge with new observations. This paper proposes a method for periodically updating Markovian transition probabilities as new... 

If at least one out of two serial machines that produce a specific product in manufacturing environments malfunctions, there will be non conforming items produced. Determining the optimal time of the machines' maintenance is the one of major concerns. While a convenient common practice for this kind of problem is to fit a single probability distribution to the combined defect data, it does not adequately capture the fact that there are two different underlying causes of failures. A better approach is to view the defects as arising from a mixture population: one due to the first machine failures and the other due to the second one. In this article, a mixture model along with both Bayesian... 

An access control model for Semantic Web should take the semantic relationships among the entities, defined in the abstract conceptual level (i.e., ontology level), into account. Authorization and policy specification based on a logical model let us infer implicit security policies from the explicit ones based on the defined semantic relationships in the domains of subjects, objects, and actions. In this paper, we propose a logic based access control model for specification and inference of history-constrained access policies in conceptual level of Semantic Web. The proposed model (named TDLBAC-2) enables authorities to state policy rules based on the history of users' accesses using a... 

E-learning environments are being used more efficiently by the rapid growth in internet and multimedia technologies. Adaptive learning is a kind of learning environment which provides individual learning. It can customize the learning style according to the individual's personality and characteristics. Although there are a lot of e-learning systems having adaptive learning feature, they do not satisfy all adaptive learning aspects. This paper proposes a new method which tries to help learners find educational contents adapted to their personalities in an efficient manner. Our proposed method has four essential parts: 1) It finds out learner's features by Bayesian networks. 2) Then It tries... 

Bayesian inference has traditionally been conceived as the proper framework for the formal incorporation of expert knowledge in parameter estimation of groundwater models. However, conventional Bayesian inference is incapable of taking into account the imprecision essentially embedded in expert provided information. In order to solve this problem, a number of extensions to conventional Bayesian inference have been introduced in recent years. One of these extensions is 'fuzzy Bayesian inference' which is the result of integrating fuzzy techniques into Bayesian statistics. Fuzzy Bayesian inference has a number of desirable features which makes it an attractive approach for incorporating expert... 

Although there is an increasing interest in employing the depth data in computer vision applications, the spatial resolution of depth maps is still limited compared with typical visible-light images. A novel method is proposed to synthetically improve the spatial resolution of a single depth image. It integrates the higher-order terms into the Markov random field (MRF) formulation of example-based methods in order to improve the representational power of those methods. The inference is performed by approximately minimising the higher-order multi-label MRF energies. In addition, to improve the efficiency of the inference algorithm, a hierarchical scheme on the number of MRF states is... 

Multiple human 3D pose estimation is a challenging task. It is mainly because of large variations in the scale and pose of humans, fast motions, multiple persons in the scene, and arbitrary number of visible body parts due to occlusion or truncation. Some of these ambiguities can be resolved by using multiview images. This is due to the fact that more evidences of body parts would be available in multiple views. In this work, a novel method for multiple human 3D pose estimation using evidences in multiview images is proposed. The proposed method utilizes a fully connected pairwise conditional random field that contains two types of pairwise terms. The first pairwise term encodes the spatial... 

Poisson factorization is a probabilistic model of users and items for recommendation systems, where the so-called implicit consumer data is modeled by a factorized Poisson distribution. There are many variants of Poisson factorization methods who show state-of-the-art performance on real-world recommendation tasks. However, most of them do not explicitly take into account the temporal behavior and the recurrent activities of users which is essential to recommend the right item to the right user at the right time. In this paper, we introduce Recurrent Poisson Factorization (RPF) framework that generalizes the classical PF methods by utilizing a Poisson process for modeling the implicit... 

A new time-domain hierarchical Bayesian framework is proposed to improve the performance of Bayesian methods in terms of reliability and robustness of estimates particularly for uncertainty quantification and propagation in structural dynamics. The proposed framework provides a reliable approach to account for the variability of the inference results observed when using different data sets. The proposed formulation is compared with a state-of-the-art Bayesian approach using numerical and experimental examples. The results indicate that the hierarchical Bayesian framework provides a more realistic account of the uncertainties, whereas the non-hierarchical Bayesian approach severely... 

Multiple human 3D pose estimation is a challenging task. It is mainly because of large variations in the scale and pose of humans, fast motions, multiple persons in the scene, and arbitrary number of visible body parts due to occlusion or truncation. Some of these ambiguities can be resolved by using multiview images. This is due to the fact that more evidences of body parts would be available in multiple views. In this work, a novel method for multiple human 3D pose estimation using evidences in multiview images is proposed. The proposed method utilizes a fully connected pairwise conditional random field that contains two types of pairwise terms. The first pairwise term encodes the spatial... 

The interferometer method as one of the most accurate schemes for wideband direction finding (DF) is used. The interferometer method has various algorithms which can be implemented depending on the required specifications. The advantages and disadvantages of these algorithms have been evaluated and the appropriate algorithm for a general practical case in view of the ambiguity resolution is proposed. The receivers’ channel phase tracking error is of significant concern in practice in interferometric DF systems. The induced error due to channels phase tracking error is estimated. Furthermore the use of physically realizable antennas, achievement of high accuracy, minimum number of antennas... 

User modeling plays an important role in delivering customized web services to the users and improving their engagement. However, most user models in the literature do not explicitly consider the temporal behavior of users. More recently, continuous-time user modeling has gained considerable attention and many user behavior models have been proposed based on temporal point processes. However, typical point process-based models often considered the impact of peer influence and content on the user participation and neglected other factors. Gamification elements are among those factors that are neglected, while they have a strong impact on user participation in online services. In this article,... 

In this research, we employ Bayesian inference and stochastic dynamic programming approaches to select the binomial population with the largest probability of success from n independent Bernoulli populations based upon the sample information. To do this, we first define a probability measure called belief for the event of selecting the best population. Second, we explain the way to model the selection problem using Bayesian inference. Third, we clarify the model by which we improve the beliefs and prove that it converges to select the best population. In this iterative approach, we update the beliefs by taking new observations on the populations under study. This is performed using Bayesian... 

A new time-domain hierarchical Bayesian framework is proposed to improve the performance of Bayesian methods in terms of reliability and robustness of estimates particularly for uncertainty quantification and propagation in structural dynamics. The proposed framework provides a reliable approach to account for the variability of the inference results observed when using different data sets. The proposed formulation is compared with a state-of-the-art Bayesian approach using numerical and experimental examples. The results indicate that the hierarchical Bayesian framework provides a more realistic account of the uncertainties, whereas the non-hierarchical Bayesian approach severely...