Sharif Digital Repository

Personalized advertising has grown drastically as new tracking technologies allow advertisers to monitor consumers’ online behavior and distribute advertisements accordingly, which has given rise to privacy concerns. The present study investigates the role of personality traits and data source in social media behavioral advertising’s value perception. Two online studies were conducted to examine how plasticity (shared variance of openness and extraversion) and data source (first party vs third-party) affect consumers’ privacy calculus and purchase intention respectively. The participants, all active social media users from the United States, were hired from Prolific.co. For the first study,... 

The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of the effective factors on information satisfaction on customer online shopping behavior in Iran. In this regard, by reviewing the concepts of online shopping, customer behavior and information quality, using regression and structural equation modeling, we examined the role of the effective factors on information satisfaction on customer online shopping behavior in Iran. The statistical population of this study consisted of DJ's customers, their number is estimated to be unlimited, and the sample size was determined using Morgan Krjesy's table to determine the sample size of 384 people who were selected using simple random sampling. A... 

Local scour around bridge piers is one of the main causes of bridge failures Application of existing equations to complex flow patterns is problematic and often leads to questionable results in the field applications. A lack of understanding of the complex flow field and erosion mechanisms seems to be at least partly responsible for this state. Despite the rapid expansion of the literature on the flow around cylindrical piers, there are still challenges for flow field comprehension and estimating design scour depths around complex bridge piers. Due to geotechnical and economical reasons, bridge designs often leads to a complex foundation. Laboratory studies of local scour around complex... 

The main purpose of this Thesis is to study logistics situation of L90 production site at Iran khodro Co. and improving it to achieve the project and investment goals. Some proposals in the fields of plant layout redesign, inbound logistics, material flow analysis, and Kanban and synchrony systems development are offered. Plant layout optimization based on allowing facilities parting into more than one section is studied and its mathematical model is developed. A heuristic alogorithm for this type of FLP’s has been offered which optimizes a given solution. The propsed methodology is applied on a real case-Iran khdro L90 site and the obtained solution indicates good results of the algorithm.... 

Numerical simulations and large eddy simulations (LES) of turbulent flow around single pile, circular tandem piles, circular and square side-by-side piles at different spacing ratios (centre to centre distance to the pile diameter) with flow Reynolds number of 105 on the fixed flat-bed are presented. The calculations are performed using a computational fluid dynamics model, FLOW-3D, which solves the Navier-Stokes equations in three dimensions with finite volume method. Numerical simulations are validated by comparing the numerical results of time-averaged flow patterns around single and side-by-side piles with that of the experimental measurements. At the downstream of single pile,... 

Nowadays, the cooling of electronic equipment has become a challenge for designers and scientists due to their progress. One of the most effective solutions for cooling these devices is using microchannel heat sinks. Researchers conducted so many studies experimentally, numerically, or a combination of them to increase the efficiency of microchannel heat sinks. Several methods have been proposed in previous studies to improve the cooling performance, such as using fins, nanoparticles, porous material, etc. Although increasing the heat exchange surface by using fins is caused to increase heat transfer, it also causes an increase in pressure drop. For this reason, researchers are looking for... 

Statistical studies indicate the fact that in Iran, like many other developing countries, a significant percentage of buildings are made of traditional materials and most of them are adobe buildings especially in rural areas. Furthermore, geological data indicates that Iran is located in alps-Himalayas seismic zone and exposed by destructive earthquakes and adobe buildings suffer the most damages comparing with other type of the structures. According to these explanations, this research deals with adobe buildings behavior and provides solutions for reinforcing them and improving the seismic response of these buildings. These studies include numerical modeling with finite elements methods by... 

In this thesis, the mechanical properties of collagen hydrogels were characterized using Finite Element method and the collagen content effect on the mechanical properties of hydrogels were investigated. Hydrogels samples with different collagen content were assessed which caused diverse mechanical behaviors. Due to the nonlinear behavior of hydrogels, using numerical methods and simulation softwars can be helpful to determine the mechanical properties of these material and save agreat deal of time. Finite Viscoelaticity theory was exploited for a UMAT Subroutine in Abaqus and an special Starin Energy Function was selected to extract the formulations. The agreement between simulation results... 

In this thesis we consider the problem of distributed computation by many processors.We mainly concentrate on matrix multiplication problem in this thesis because of its importance. A distributed system consists of N worker processors and one master processor. The master processor should distribute the computation between workers and after computation in each of them, collect the results. In this thesis, we are going to mitigate the effect of straggler processors by using coding methods. Straggler processors can cause delays in the computation time.In this thesis, we firstly introduce a method to multiply any number of matrices in each other. The proposed method occurred in one shot without... 

The development of a complex software needs an abstraction mechanism which is called Model Driven Engineering mechanism. In order to have a successful model based process, we need an appropriate tool such as version control systems to support our model-based process. On the other hand, developers need a mechanism to synchronize them with VCS systems. One of the concerns in modeling languages is the compatibility and the consistency of the models and modeling languages during their evaluation. the focus of the former researches was mostly on the consistency of the models during their evaluation, and to this end, lots of approaches have been proposed for keeping the consistency of the models... 

Nowadays economical issues are greatly taken into consideration. In this project we aim to study a problem of this area, which focuses on the subject of location allocation and pricing strategy for a good supplier. Solution evaluation is done by taking costumer demand into account. This problem has a sequential characteristic. That is players do not take their decisions at the same time. Suppliers should first decide about where and how they plan to provide their goods. On the other hand almost every economical problem have multiple players who play with or against each other. Therefore modeling this problem using Stackelberg leadership model is a natural choice. Since this problem is in the... 

Preventive maintenance strategies have been considered by highway agencies in order to increase pavement service life and to reduce the costs associated with pavement maintenance. Due to the increasing concern regarding promoting sustainable pavements, consideration of the environmental, economic and performance factors in devising preventive maintenance strategies is of great importance.This study contributes to developing a multicriteria decision-making tool for sustainability evaluation of pavement preventive maintenance strategies. The developed tool, PaveSAT, considers the greenhouse gas emission, net present value, and pavement performance to rank preventive maintenance schemes using... 

The main goal of current investigation was partial reduction of Fe2O3 available in Hematite-rich ore to Magnetite by Fludization Bed method. The reductive gas, CO, was produced by incomplete combustion of Acetylene and Airmixed in inappropriate ratio. X-Ray Diffraction and X-Ray Florescence analyses were implemented in order to conducting qualitative analysis of present phases before and after reduction of the ore. Quantitative analysis of the same phases was also conducted by Titration. The latter analysis revealed the precise magnitude of available iron in each of the oxide containing phases. The chemical composition of the reactor gas was also determined before and after reduction... 

Abstract The problem of competetive facility location can be defined as follows: There are a number of customers in the form of points in space, and two players arrange a number of facilities in the form of points in space, given some limitations, respectively. Each customer’s connection to each facility has a cost for the customer and an advantage for the facility, and each customer wants to be connected to at most one of the facilities which has the lowest cost for him. The goal is to find the strategy of placing the facilities and determining the cost which the facility receives from the customer, in such a way that the player’s profit is maximised.In this thesis, we first sought to... 

Zero knowledge proofs allow a person (prover) to convince another person (verifier) that he has performed a specific computation on a secret data correctly, and has obtained a true answer, without having to disclose the secret data. QAP (Quadratic Arithmetic Program) based zkSNARKs (zero knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge) are a type of zero knowledge proof. They have several properties that make them attractive in practice, e.g. verifier's work is very easy. So they are used in many areas such as Blockchain and cloud computing. But yet prover's work in QAP based zkSNARKs is heavy, therefore, it may not be possible for a prover with limited processing resource to run... 

Lightweight clients are a type of blockchain users who do not store all the blocks in the blockchain due to limited resources. These users store only a small part of each block and when needed, request transactions from full nodes that store the entire blockchain. These users have no role in block validation and only want to receive transactions related to their addresses with proof of the inclusion in the block from full nodes.Since light clients rely on full nodes for receiving transactions, their privacy against full nodes is important. The current implementation of Bitcoin uses Bloom filters for privacy, but this offers very little privacy to the users.In this thesis, we study the... 

Power system frequency regulation entitled load frequency control (LFC) has been one of the important control problems in electric power system design and operation. Off-normal frequency can directly impact on power system operation and system reliability. A large frequency deviation can damage equipment, degrade load performance, cause the transmission lines to be overloaded and can interfere with system protection schemes, ultimately leading to an unstable condition for the power system . On the other hand, the increasing need for electrical energy in the 21st century, as well as limited fossil fuel reserves and the increasing concerns with environmental issues for the reduction of carbon...