Sharif Digital Repository

We investigate the multiple use of a ferromagnetic spin chain for quantum and classical communications without resetting. We find that the memory of the state transmitted during the first use makes the spin chain a qualitatively different quantum channel during the second transmission, for which we find the relevant Kraus operators. We propose a parameter to quantify the amount of memory in the channel and find that it influences the quality of the channel, as reflected through fidelity and entanglement transmissible during the second use. For certain evolution times, the memory allows the channel to exceed the memoryless classical capacity (achieved by separable inputs) and in some cases it... 

Currently there is no standard test collection for evaluation of Farsi information retrieval systems. In this paper we introduce Mahak, the first complete test collection generally available for evaluating Farsi information retrieval systems. In addition, we have used different methods for constructing Mahak qrels and we have compared performance of these methods  

Question Answering systems are one of the hot topics in context of information retrieval. In this paper, we develop an open-domain Question Answering system for spatial queries. We use Google for gathering raw data from the Web and then in a few iterations density of potential answers will be increased, finally based on a couple of evaluators the best answers are selected to be returned to user. Our proposed algorithm uses fuzzy methods to be more precise. Some experiments have been designed in order to evaluate the performance of our algorithm and results are totally promising. We will describe that how this algorithm can be applied to other type of questions as well  

The spread of information cascades over social networks forms the diffusion networks. The latent structure of diffusion networks makes the problem of extracting diffusion links difficult. As observing the sources of information is not usually possible, the only available prior knowledge is the infection times of individuals. We confront these challenges by proposing a new method called DNE to extract the diffusion networks by using the time-series data. We model the diffusion process on information networks as a Markov random walk process and develop an algorithm to discover the most probable diffusion links. We validate our model on both synthetic and real data and show the low dependency... 

We propose a self-adaptive process (SAP) that maintains the software architecture quality using the MAPE-K standard model. The proposed process can be plugged into various software development processes and service-oriented methodologies due to its explicitly defined inputs and outputs. To this aim, the proposed SAP is integrated with the service-oriented modeling and application (SOMA) methodology in a two-layered structure to create a novel methodology, named self-adaptive service-oriented architecture methodology (SASOAM), which provides a semi-automatic self-aware method by the composition of architectural tactics. Moreover, the maintenance activity of SOMA is improved using... 

We propose a self-adaptive process (SAP) that maintains the software architecture quality using the MAPE-K standard model. The proposed process can be plugged into various software development processes and service-oriented methodologies due to its explicitly defined inputs and outputs. To this aim, the proposed SAP is integrated with the service-oriented modeling and application (SOMA) methodology in a two-layered structure to create a novel methodology, named self-adaptive service-oriented architecture methodology (SASOAM), which provides a semi-automatic self-aware method by the composition of architectural tactics. Moreover, the maintenance activity of SOMA is improved using... 

Online media play an important role in information societies by providing a convenient infrastructure for different processes. Information diffusion that is a fundamental process taking place on social and information networks has been investigated in many studies. Research on information diffusion in these networks faces two main challenges: (1) In most cases, diffusion takes place on an underlying network, which is latent and its structure is unknown. (2) This latent network is not fixed and changes over time. In this article, we investigate the diffusion network extraction (DNE) problem when the underlying network is dynamic and latent. We model the diffusion behavior (existence... 

Web is one of the biggest sources of information. The tremendous size, the dynamicity, and the structure of the Web have made the information retrieval process of the web a challenging issue. Web Search Engines (WSEs) have started to help users with this matter. However, these types of application, to perform more effectively, always need current information about many characteristics of the Web. To determine these characteristics, one way is to use statistical sampling of the Web pages. In this kind of approaches, instead of analyzing a large number of Web pages, a rather smaller and more uniform set of Web pages is used. This research attempts to analyze the presented methods for... 

In the near future, manufacturing industries will be mostly recognised with characteristics like IoT, and massive data transactions. To fulfil these characteristics, paradigms like Cloud manufacturing, Industry 4.0 and smart factory have passed their preliminary steps to become the primary inspirations. Considering the nature of Cloud manufacturing which consists of a vast number of service providers and Service demanders being introduced to the manufacturing cloud, service composition problem is introduced. However, there is a big challenge for fulfilling the dynamic behaviour of parameters which change rapidly over time in the service composition problem. This paper challenges the... 

We present and evaluate Deep Private-Feature Extractor (DPFE), a deep model which is trained and evaluated based on information theoretic constraints. Using the selective exchange of information between a user's device and a service provider, DPFE enables the user to prevent certain sensitive information from being shared with a service provider, while allowing them to extract approved information using their model. We introduce and utilize the log-rank privacy, a novel measure to assess the effectiveness of DPFE in removing sensitive information and compare different models based on their accuracy-privacy trade-off. We then implement and evaluate the performance of DPFE on smartphones to... 

Grid computing is a type of parallel and distributed system that provides the possibility of sharing, choosing and collecting the autonomous resources (such as computer, software, databases, and equipments) that are distributed geographically. Resource discovery is one of the key subjects in distributed systems and especially Grids. We should consider that Grid consists of different applications that each of them consist of different hardware and software resources, therefore recognizing these resources is important in a Grid system. Classical approaches to Grid resource discovery are either centralized or hierarchical [1] (and will maybe prove inefficient as the scale of Grid systems... 

Recently, manufacturing firms and logistics service providers have been encouraged to deploy the most recent features of Information Technology (IT) to prevail in the competitive circumstances of manufacturing industries. Industry 4.0 and Cloud manufacturing (CMfg), accompanied by a service-oriented architecture model, have been regarded as renowned approaches to enable and facilitate the transition of conventional manufacturing business models into more efficient and productive ones. Furthermore, there is an aptness among the manufacturing and logistics businesses as service providers to synergize and cut down the investment and operational costs via sharing logistics fleet and production... 

Recently, manufacturing firms and logistics service providers have been encouraged to deploy the most recent features of Information Technology (IT) to prevail in the competitive circumstances of manufacturing industries. Industry 4.0 and Cloud manufacturing (CMfg), accompanied by a service-oriented architecture model, have been regarded as renowned approaches to enable and facilitate the transition of conventional manufacturing business models into more efficient and productive ones. Furthermore, there is an aptness among the manufacturing and logistics businesses as service providers to synergize and cut down the investment and operational costs via sharing logistics fleet and production... 

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a software design framework where distributed services are provided and used by applications over a network. By using this architecture new challenges appeared for software testing. Lack of access to the source code and runtime binding are examples of these challenges. Functional testing of services assures the quality of service-oriented applications. In this paper, we introduce a new 3-phase consumer and provider contract-based process for web service testing to overcome SOA testing challenges. Our proposed process, namely OTaaWS, consists of Test Automation, Test Execution and Test Management steps on the provider's side, which can be done on-demand.... 

Continuous improvement and extension of pervasive computing environments, in which objects have high mobility and limited computing power, implies service migration to be considered as one of the main issues. On the other hand, context-awareness which is the most distinguishable feature of pervasive computing helps better serving of users. Accordingly, migration in the presence of context-awareness is considered as the underlying of our motivation. This improves the performance of migration, which is not easily achievable through traditional migration techniques. In this paper we introduce a model to support context-aware migration besides its migration process phases and framework. Our... 

Progressive use of Web based information retrieval systems such as general purpose search engines and dynamic nature of the Web make it necessary to continually maintain Web based information retrieval systems. Crawlers facilitate this process by following hyperlinks in Web pages to automatically download new and updated Web pages. Freshness (recency) is one of the important maintaining factors of Web search engine crawlers that takes weeks to months. Many large Web crawlers start from seed pages, fetch every links from them, and continually repeat this process without any policies that help them to better crawling and improving performance of those. We believe that data mining techniques... 

The cloud manufacturing paradigm has been known as one of the best solutions for today's competitive manufacturing environments. This paradigm insists on using a manufacturing service oriented approach for fulfilling the manufacturing enterprise resource management by the access to global availability of manufacturing services. The proposed service oriented approach covers a wide area of manufacturing resource management from infrastructures to platforms and applications. However, due to wide global distributions of manufacturing clouds, the service oriented architectures which are designed in the clouds cannot communicate with each other. This is mainly due to concentration of cloud... 

People use social networks to share millions of stories every day, but these stories rarely become viral. Can we estimate the probability that a story becomes a viral cascade If so, can we find a set of users that are more likely to trigger viral cascades These estimation and maximization problems are very challenging since both rare-event nature of viral cascades and efficiency requirement should be considered. Unfortunately, this problem still remains largely unexplored to date. In this paper, given temporal dynamics of a network, we first develop an efficient viral cascade probability estimation method, VICE, that leverages an special importance sampling approximation to achieve high... 

User engagement in online social networking depends critically on the level of social activity in the corresponding platform-the number of online actions, such as posts, shares or replies, taken by their users. Can we design data-driven algorithms to increase social activity? At a user level, such algorithms may increase activity by helping users decide when to take an action to be more likely to be noticed by their peers. At a network level, they may increase activity by incentivizing a few influential users to take more actions, which in turn will trigger additional actions by other users. In this paper, we model social activity using the framework of marked temporal point processes,... 

We present and evaluate Deep Private-Feature Extractor (DPFE), a deep model which is trained and evaluated based on information theoretic constraints. Using the selective exchange of information between a user's device and a service provider, DPFE enables the user to prevent certain sensitive information from being shared with a service provider, while allowing them to extract approved information using their model. We introduce and utilize the log-rank privacy, a novel measure to assess the effectiveness of DPFE in removing sensitive information and compare different models based on their accuracy-privacy trade-off. We then implement and evaluate the performance of DPFE on smartphones to...