"This book provides readers with a simplified and comprehensive account of the cognitive and neural bases of face perception in humans. Faces are ubiquitous in our environment and we rely on them during social interactions. The human face processing system allows us to extract i…
Buzz Aldrin speaks out as a vital advocate for the continuing quest to push the boundaries of the universe as we know it. As a pioneering astronaut who first set foot on the moon during mankind's first landing of Apollo 11-- and as an aerospace engineer who designed an orbital r…
Conceived as a series of more or less autonomous essays, the present book critically exposes the initial developments of continuum thermo-mechanics in a post Newtonian period extending from the creative works of the Bernoullis to the First World war, i.e., roughly during first t…
This thesis describes an important step towards the standardization of the research on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in Farsi language. It includes the development of several novel and standard Farsi handwritten databases, consisting of Farsi isolated digits, isolated lett…
The overriding objective of this research was to develop an understanding of Iran's policy environment, within which the country's mining sector operates, in relation to that of the rest of the world. In an effort to diversify the country's economy, the first five-year developme…
Poultry litter is an important nutrient source in crop production. However, the traditional practice of broadcasting poultry litter on the soil surface could result in nutrient losses in runoff as well as substantial ammonia volatilization losses, which could adversely affect bo…
Utilizing the political economy approach, this study analyzes the oil policies of the Islamic regime of Iran from the Revolution of February 11, 1979, to the end of the first term of the presidency of Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, on August 4, 1993. Although the detailed analysi…
The August 17, 1999, Kocaeli, Turkey earthquake (Mw = 7.4) struck the northwestern region of the country and was one of the most deadly and costly earthquakes of the country's modern history. Ground failure in Adapazari was particularly severe. Besides pervasive structural damag…
This thesis focuses on an intuitive and robust GIS (Geographic Information systems) tool, which gives an overview of religions in Middle East Asia. Part of the motivation for this thesis was curiosity to find answers to why castes and sub-castes were created from the same religi…
This thesis analyzes the human waste crisis in India. The lack of sanitation facilities as well as open defecation seriously impacts India's ability to achieve its sanitation goals by 2015. More importantly, if the World Health Organization is to meet its Millennium Development …
Supervised learning systems require a large quantity of labeled data, which is time-consuming, expensive and in some cases requires linguistic expertise to create. Semi-supervised methods combine the use of labeled with unlabeled data—which are abundant in the forms of monolingu…
Algebraic soft-decision decoding of Reed-Solomon codes delivers promising gain over conventional hard-decision decoding. The major computational steps in algebraic soft-decoding (as well as Sudan-type list-decoding) are bivariate polynomial interpolation and factorization. In th…
Digital document processing is becoming popular for applications to office and library automation, bank and postal services, publishing houses and communication management. In recent years, the demand for tools capable of searching written and spoken sources of multilingual info…
Microtunneling is a construction method in the family of trenchless technology, which is used to install underground utilities with minimum impacts on ground surface. Microtunneling is a complex operation that requires the integration of several systems, a variety of supporting …
Today's data centers consist of several thousand PCs that provide massive amounts of computational power and storage capacity in a cost-effective manner. Due to the highly distributed nature of the applications running in these clusters, intra-node communication bandwidth is key…
Hot mixed asphalt (HMA) overlay is one of the commonly used methods for rehabilitating deteriorated pavements. The Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT) uses HMA overlays as a rehabilitation technique for the majority of the state's flexible pavements. One major type of dis…