Sharif Digital Repository

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... 

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... 

Social media usage is one of the most popular online activities and people shares millions of message in a short time; however this information rarely goes viral. The diffusion process begins with an initial set of source nodes and continues with other nodes. In addition, the viral cascade is triggered when the number of infected nodes exceeds a specific threshold. Then, we find an initial set of source nodes that maximizes the number of infected nodes given the source nodes. This study aims to answer the following questions: how does a spread like a viral cascade propagate in a network? Do the structural properties of the propagation pattern play an important role in virality? If so, can we... 

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are well-promising future networks especially for ubiquitous connection to Internet. In this paper, we propose an analytical model in order to evaluate the maximum stable throughput of a WMN based on a simplified version of IEEE 802.11s MAC protocol. Our modeling approach is based on a multi-class open queueing network. In this respect, we map some of the important features of IEEE 802.11s MAC protocol, esp., its contention-based and contention-free periods onto different parameters of the proposed queueing network. By solving the related traffic equations and applying the stability condition, we determine the maximum stable throughput, i.e., the maximum packet... 

The existing methods in attitude control of satellites are based on using the estimate of satellite attitude, which is usually generated by using multiple vector measurements. In this paper we propose an output feedback controller that directly uses a single vector measurement and does not use an attitude estimator. The output feedback gain is computed by solving a generalized Riccati differential equation (GRDE). The existence of a solution to the GRDE depends on a uniform controllability condition  

The existing methods in attitude control of satellites are based on employing the estimate of satellite attitude which is usually generated by using multiple vector measurements. In this paper we propose an output feedback control law that directly uses a single vector measurement and gyro, and without any need for estimating the satellite attitude. The output feedback gain is computed by solving a generalized Riccati time varying differential equation. We assume the moment-of-inertia matrix of satellite is unknown. The controller guarantees asymptotic convergence of the attitude to its desired value. A realistic simulation is presented where a magnetometer is used to provide the single... 

Gesture and motion recognition are needed for a variety of applications. The use of human hand motions as a natural interface tool has motivated researchers to conduct research in the modeling, analysis and recognition of various hand movements. In this work, we introduce a 3-D hand motion recognition. We use 3-D landmarked points on finger tips and joints followed by a HMM (Hidden Markov Model) to recognize hand motions. Experimentally, in an effort to evaluate the formation of hand gestures similar to those used in rehabilitation sessions, we studied three hand motions. Using natural hand motion features in an uncontrolled environment, we were able to classify, differentiate and quantify... 

According to current researches, graphene oxide (GO) membranes show promising desalination properties due to ease of synthesis, low production cost, and high efficiency. There are several experimental works to study ionic sieving properties of GO membranes. However, it is difficult to characterize atomistic mechanism of water permeation and ion rejection by experimental approaches. On the other hand, there exist a few reports in which the atomistic picture of water permeation across GO membranes is investigated by means of molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. In the present work, in addition to water desalination, the atomic scale mechanism of ion rejection is studied using large scale MD... 

In this paper the Karnaugh and Quine-McCluskey methods are used for symbolic classification problem, and then these methods are compared with other famous available methods. Because the data in classification problem is very large, some changes should be applied in the original Quine-McCluskey (QMC) algorithm. We proposed a new algorithm that applies the QMC algorithm greedily calling it GQMC. It is surprising that GQMC results are most of the time equal to QMC. GQMC is still very slow classifier and it can be used when the number of attributes of the data is small, and the ratio of training data to the all possible data is high. © 2007 IEEE  

In this study, active poly lactic acid (PLA) films containing 0, 10, 20 and 40% w/w propolis extract (PE), as active agent, were developed. A high amount of phenolic content (PC) was measured in PE. The antioxidant effect of active PLA films was determined by measuring the PC of sausage slices after 0, 2 and 4 days storage at refrigerator. Results showed that phenolic compounds of PE were released from PLA films in quantities proportional to PE concentration. Disc diffusion test indicated that PE showed an inhibitory effect against Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacterial species but was more effective against gram-positive species. PE containing PLA films had antimicrobial... 

In this work we assume that there is an agent in an unknown environment (domain). This agent has some predefined actions and it can perceive its current state in the environment completely. The mission of this agent is to fulfill the tasks (goals) that are often assigned to it as fast as it can. Acting has lots of cost, and usually planning and simulating the environment can reduce this cost. In this paper we address a new approach for incremental induction of probabilistic planning operators, from this environment while the agent tries to reach to its current goals. It should be noted that there have been some works related to incremental induction of deterministic planning operators and...