Sharif Digital Repository

Switching from the urea oxidation reaction (UOR) to the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is a beneficial way to lower the amount of energy needed to make hydrogen gas during the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). Due to the sluggish reaction kinetics of the six electrons reaction of UOR, designing a privileged bifunctional electrocatalyst for both HER and UOR necessitates. The 2D nano-sized non-noble metal electrocatalysts make it possible to speed up reactions and improve their electrocatalytic performance. We synthesized nickel-cobalt-MXene composite nanosheets (NiCoMXene) on the surface of copper foam using a one-pot, simple, and ultra-fast electrochemical method. This 2D electrocatalyst... 

BACKGROUND: StrongestPath is a Cytoscape 3 application that enables the analysis of interactions between two proteins or groups of proteins in a collection of protein-protein interaction (PPI) network or signaling network databases. When there are different levels of confidence over the interactions, the application is able to process them and identify the cascade of interactions with the highest total confidence score. Given a set of proteins, StrongestPath can extract a set of possible interactions between the input proteins, and expand the network by adding new proteins that have the most interactions with highest total confidence to the current network of proteins. The application can... 

The aim of this study is to develop a non-linear robust controller with adaptive gains in order to prevent malaria epidemic as a positive system with an uncertain model. The malaria outbreak is modelled by seven non-linear coupled differential equations for the population variables: susceptible, exposed, symptomatic infected and recovered humans and the susceptible, exposed and infected mosquitoes. The non-linear robust adaptive integral-sliding-mode controller is developed in order to appropriately adjust the use of treated bednets, treatment rate of infected individuals and the use of insecticide spray to control malaria epidemic. Accordingly, the numbers of exposed and infected humans and... 

Despite great advances, molecular cancer pathology is often limited to the use of a small number of biomarkers rather than the whole transcriptome, partly due to computational challenges. Here, we introduce a novel architecture of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) that is capable of simultaneous inference of various properties of biological samples, through multi-task and transfer learning. It encodes the whole transcription profile into a strikingly low-dimensional latent vector of size 8, and then recovers mRNA and miRNA expression profiles, tissue and disease type from this vector. This latent space is significantly better than the original gene expression profiles for discriminating samples... 

In this paper, a novel algorithm for correcting the error of attitude in inertial navigation systems is introduced. Since the oftenly used differential equations of the navigation errors show the small rotation angles instead of the error of Euler angles, the nonlinear equation between the small rotation angles and the error of Euler angles, are derived. To obtain an approximative solution for the derived equations, third order multiplication of the small rotation angles are ignored and error of Euler angles are expressed explicitly as functions of the Euler angles and the small rotation angles. Based on the obtained solution, a new algorithm for attitude correction in inertial navigation is... 

This paper presents a new robust composite nonlinear feedback control law for accurate, smooth, and fast regulation in the presence of parameter uncertainties, external disturbances, and input saturation for a class of spacecraft rendezvous systems. The novel proposed method consists of the original composite nonlinear feedback part for good transient performance plus a nonlinear disturbance rejection part for reducing the steady-state error stemming from variable disturbances and simultaneously producing feasible control input. The nonlinear disturbance rejection relies on sliding-mode observer for disturbance estimation. Closed-loop system stability has been proved with the Lyapunov... 

A new heuristic filter, called firefly filter, is proposed for state estimation of nonlinear stochastic systems. The new filter formulates the state estimation problem as a stochastic dynamic optimization and utilizes the firefly optimization algorithm to find and track the best estimation. The fireflies search the state space dynamically and are attracted to one other based on the perceived brightness. The performance of the proposed filter is evaluated for a set of benchmarks and the results are compared with the well-known filters like extended Kalman filter and particle filter, showing improvements in terms of estimation accuracy. © 2016 IEEE  

This paper presents a new robust composite nonlinear feedback control law for accurate, smooth, and fast regulation in the presence of parameter uncertainties, external disturbances, and input saturation for a class of spacecraft rendezvous systems. The novel proposed method consists of the original composite nonlinear feedback part for good transient performance plus a nonlinear disturbance rejection part for reducing the steady-state error stemming from variable disturbances and simultaneously producing feasible control input. The nonlinear disturbance rejection relies on sliding-mode observer for disturbance estimation. Closed-loop system stability has been proved with the Lyapunov... 

The lazy bureaucrat scheduling is a new class of scheduling problems that was introduced in [1]. In these problems, there is one employee (or more) who should perform the assigned jobs. The objective of the employee is to minimize the amount of work he performs and to be as inefficient as possible. He is subject to a constraint, however, that he should be busy when there is some work to do. In this paper, we focus on the cases of this problem where all jobs have the same common deadline. We show that with this constraint, the problem is still NP-hard, and prove some hardness results. We then present a tight 2-approximation algorithm for this problem under one of the defined objective... 

In this paper, a method for fast processing of data stream tuples in parallel execution of continuous queries over a multiprocessing environment is proposed. A copy of the query plan is assigned to each of processing units in the multiprocessing environment. Dynamic and continuous routing of input data stream tuples among the graph constructed by these copies (called the QueryMega Graph) for each input tuple determines that, after getting processed by each processing unit (e.g., processor), to which next processor it should be forwarded. Selection of the proper next processor is performed such that the destination processor imposes the minimum tuple latency to the corresponding tuple, among... 

Meta-heuristic algorithms have been successfully applied to solve the redundancy allocation problem in recent years. Among these algorithms, the electromagnetism-like mechanism (EM) is a powerful population-based algorithm designed for continuous decision spaces. This paper presents an efficient memory-based electromagnetism-like mechanism called MBEM to solve the redundancy allocation problem. The proposed algorithm employs a memory matrix in local search to save the features of good solutions and feed it back to the algorithm. This would make the search process more efficient. To verify the good performance of MBEM, various test problems, especially the 33 well-known benchmark instances in... 

Background: Pluripotency is proposed to exist in two different stages: Naive and Primed. Conventional human pluripotent cells are essentially in the primed stage. In recent years, several protocols have claimed to generate naive human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). To the best of our knowledge, none of these protocols is currently recognized as the gold standard method. Furthermore, the consistency of the resulting cells from these diverse protocols at the molecular level is yet to be shown. Additionally, little is known about the principles that govern the metabolic differences between naive and primed pluripotency. In this work, using a computational approach, we tried to shed light on... 

In this research, polyaniline@Ba0.5Sr0.5Fe12O19@MWCNTs nanocomposite was prepared via co-precipitation and in-situ polymerization methods, respectively. Microstructural, magnetic and electromagnetic wave absorption analysis of the prepared nanocomposite were studied via XRD, FESEM, VSM and VNA. Compared with Ba0.5Sr0.5Fe12O19@MWCNTs, the microwave absorption bandwidth of the coated nanocompoite with polyaniline was significantly enhanced, which increased to approxiamately 4 GHz from 3 GHz. The effective microwave absorption performance of the Ba0.5Sr0.5Fe12O19@MWCNTs nanocomposite was attributed to increase in the interfacial polarization, improvement in impedance matching as well as porous... 

Understanding cell identity is an important task in many biomedical areas. Expression patterns of specific marker genes have been used to characterize some limited cell types, but exclusive markers are not available for many cell types. A second approach is to use machine learning to discriminate cell types based on the whole gene expression profiles (GEPs). The accuracies of simple classification algorithms such as linear discriminators or support vector machines are limited due to the complexity of biological systems. We used deep neural networks to analyze 1040 GEPs from 16 different human tissues and cell types. After comparing different architectures, we identified a specific structure... 

In this research, the interaction between electroencephalogram (EEG) and, a cardiac parameter, photoplethysmogram (PPG), using connectivity measures to emphasize the importance of autonomic nervous system over the central nervous system during a deception is investigated. In this survey, connectivity analysis was applied, since it can provide information flow of brain regions; moreover, lying and truth appear to be cohered with the flow of information in the brain. Initially, a new wavelet-based approach for EEG/PPG effective connectivity fusion was introduced; then, it was validated for 41 subjects. For each subject, after extracting specific wavelet component of EEG and PPG signals, an... 

Deception is mentioned as an expression or action which hides the truth and deception detection as a concept to uncover the truth. In this research, a connectivity analysis of Electro Encephalography study is presented regarding cognitive processes of an instructed liar/truth-teller about identity during an interview. In this survey, connectivity analysis is applied because it can provide unique information about brain activity patterns of lying and interaction among brain regions. The novelty of this paper lies in applying an open-ended questions interview protocol during EEG recording. We recruited 40 healthy participants to record EEG signal during the interview. For each subject,... 

The emergence of fog computing has significantly enhanced real-time data processing by bringing computation resources closer to data sources. This adoption is very beneficial in the healthcare sector, where abundant time-sensitive processing tasks exist. Although such adoption is very promising, there is a challenge with the limited computational capacity of fog nodes. This challenge becomes even more critical when mobile IoT nodes enter the network, potentially increasing the network load. To address this challenge, this paper presents a framework that leverages a Many-to-One offloading (M2One) policy designed for modelling the dynamic nature and time-critical aspect of processing tasks in... 

The superhydrophobicity of surfaces is a critical characteristic to prevent the corrosion problem, as a significant challenge under corrosive environments. In the present study, the nickel-cobalt (NC) alloy micro-nano hierarchical structure, along with the insertion of TiO2 nanoparticles (NCT) prepared by the economical and facile electrodeposition and myristic acid (MA) fatty acid physically adsorbed on the surface of NCT to reduce surface energy. The stability improvement of the prepared micro-nano scale composite due to the presence of TiO2 nanoparticles preserves the superhydrophobic feature created by the hierarchical structure and the fatty acid placed on the surface. The surface... 

In this paper, the three-dimensional adaptive finite element modeling is presented for cohesive fracture analysis of non-planer crack growth. The technique is performed based on the Zienkiewicz-Zhu error estimator by employing the modified superconvergent patch recovery procedure for the stress recovery. The Espinosa-Zavattieri bilinear constitutive equation is used to describe the cohesive tractions and displacement jumps. The 3D cohesive fracture element is employed to simulate the crack growth in a non-planar curved pattern. The crack growth criterion is proposed in terms of the principal stress and its direction. Finally, several numerical examples are analyzed to demonstrate the... 

Motivation: Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is important and challenging problem of computational biology. Most of the existing methods can only provide a short length multiple alignments in an acceptable time. Nevertheless, when the researchers confront the genome size in the multiple alignments, the process has required a huge processing space/time. Accordingly, using the method that can align genome size rapidly and precisely has a great effect, especially on the analysis of the very long alignments. Herein, we have proposed an efficient method, called FAME, which vertically divides sequences from the places that they have common areas; then they are arranged in consecutive order. Then...