<p>The global impact of the converging dual epidemics of tuberculosis (TB) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is one of the major public health challenges of our time, because in many countries, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) are among the leading causes of morbidity and mortality. It is found that infection with HIV increases the risk of reactivating latent TB infection, and HIV-infected individuals who acquire new TB infections have high rates of disease progression. Research has shown that these two diseases are enormous public health burden, and unfortunately, not much has been done in terms of modeling the dynamics of HIV-TB co-infection at a population level. In this thesis, we study these models and design and analyze robust numerical methods to solve them. To proceed in this direction, first we study the sub-models and then the full model. The first sub-model describes the transmission dynamics of HIV that accounts for behavior change. The impact of HIV educational campaigns is also studied. Further, we explore the effects of behavior change and different responses of individuals to educational campaigns in a situation where individuals may not react immediately to these campaigns. This is done by considering a distributed time delay in the HIV sub-model. This leads to Hopf bifurcations around the endemic equilibria of the model. These bifurcations correspond to the existence of periodic solutions that oscillate around the equilibria at given thresholds. Further, we show how the delay can result in more HIV infections causing more increase in the HIV prevalence. Part of this study is then extended to study a co-infection model of HIV-TB. A thorough bifurcation analysis is carried out for this model. Robust numerical methods are then designed and analyzed for these models.&nbsp / Comparative numerical results are also provided for each model.</p>

There is a growing interest in the dynamics of the co-infection of these two diseases. In this thesis, firstly we focus on studying the effect of a distributed delay representing the incubation period for the malaria parasite in the mosquito vector to possibly reduce the initial transmission and prevalence of malaria. This model can be regarded as a generalization of SEI models (with a class for the latently infected mosquitoes) and SI models with a discrete delay for the incubation period in mosquitoes. We study the possibility of occurrence of backward bifurcation. We then extend these ideas to study a full model of HIV and malaria co-infection. To get further inside into the dynamics of the model, we use the geometric singular perturbation theory to couple the fast and slow models from the full model. Finally, since the governing models are very complex, they cannot be solved analytically and hence we develop and analyze a special class of numerical methods to solve them.

In this thesis, we study these models and design and analyze robust numerical methods to solve them. To proceed in this direction, first we study the sub-models and then the full model. The first sub-model describes the transmission dynamics of HIV that accounts for behavior change. The impact of HIV educational campaigns is also studied. Further, we explore the effects of behavior change and different responses of individuals to educational campaigns in a situation where individuals may not react immediately to these campaigns. This is done by considering a distributed time delay in the HIV sub-model. This leads to Hopf bifurcations around the endemic equilibria of the model. These bifurcations correspond to the existence of periodic solutions that oscillate around the equilibria at given thresholds. Further, we show how the delay can result in more HIV infections causing more increase in the HIV prevalence. Part of this study is then extended to study a co-infection model of HIV-TB. A thorough bifurcation analysis is carried out for this model. Robust numerical methods are then designed and analyzed for these models. Comparative numerical results are also provided for each model.

In the development of digital communication and information theory, every channel decoding rule has resulted in a revolution at the time when it was invented. In the area of information theory, early channel coding theorems were established mainly by maximum likelihood decoding, while the arrival of typical sequence decoding signaled the era of multi-user information theory, in which achievability proof became simple and intuitive. Practical channel code design, on the other hand, was based on minimum distance decoding at the early stage. The invention of belief propagation decoding with soft input and soft output, leading to the birth of turbo codes and low-density-parity check (LDPC) codes which are indispensable coding techniques in current communication systems, changed the whole research area so dramatically that people started to use the term "modern coding theory'' to refer to the research based on this decoding rule. In this thesis, we propose a new decoding rule, dubbed jar decoding, which would be expected to bring some new thoughts to both the code performance analysis and the code design. Given any channel with input alphabet X and output alphabet Y, jar decoding rule can be simply expressed as follows: upon receiving the channel output y^n ∈ Y^n, the decoder first forms a set (called a jar) of sequences x^n ∈ X^n considered to be close to y^n and pick any codeword (if any) inside this jar as the decoding output. The way how the decoder forms the jar is defined independently with the actual channel code and even the channel statistics in certain cases. Under this jar decoding, various coding theorems are proved in this thesis. First of all, focusing on the word error probability, jar decoding is shown to be near optimal by the achievabilities proved via jar decoding and the converses proved via a proof technique, dubbed the outer mirror image of jar, which is also quite related to jar decoding. Then a Taylor-type expansion of optimal channel coding rate with finite block length is discovered by combining those achievability and converse theorems, and it is demonstrated that jar decoding is optimal up to the second order in this Taylor-type expansion. Flexibility of jar decoding is then illustrated by proving LDPC coding theorems via jar decoding, where the bit error probability is concerned. And finally, we consider a coding scenario, called interactive encoding and decoding, and show that jar decoding can be also used to prove coding theorems and guide the code design in the scenario of two-way communication.

In this thesis, the symmetry structure of gravitational theories at null infinity is studied further, in the case of pure gravity in four dimensions and also in the case of Einstein-Yang-Mills theory in d dimensions with and without a cosmological constant.<p><p>The first part of this thesis is devoted to the presentation of asymptotic methods (symmetries, solution space and surface charges) applied to gravity in the case of the BMS gauge in three and four spacetime dimensions.<p><p>The second part of this thesis contains the original contributions.<p>Firstly, it is shown that the enhancement from Lorentz to Virasoro algebra also occurs for asymptotically flat spacetimes defined in the sense of Newman-Unti. As a first application, the transformation laws of the Newman-Penrose coefficients characterizing solution space of the Newman-Unti approach are worked out, focusing on the inhomogeneous terms that contain the information about central extensions of the theory. These transformations laws make the conformal structure particularly transparent, and constitute the main original result of the thesis.<p>Secondly, asymptotic symmetries of the Einstein-Yang-Mills system with or without cosmological constant are explicitly worked out in a unified manner in $d$ dimensions. In agreement with a recent conjecture, a Virasoro-Kac-Moody type algebra is found not only in three dimensions but also in the four dimensional asymptotically flat case.<p><p>These two parts of the thesis are supplemented by appendices. / Doctorat en Sciences / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / There is a growing interest in the dynamics of the co-infection of these two diseases. In this thesis, firstly we focus on studying the effect of a distributed delay representing the incubation period for the malaria parasite in the mosquito vector to possibly reduce the initial transmission and prevalence of malaria. This model can be regarded as a generalization of SEI models (with a class for the latently infected mosquitoes) and SI models with a discrete delay for the incubation period in mosquitoes. We study the possibility of occurrence of backward bifurcation. We then extend these ideas to study a full model of HIV and malaria co-infection. To get further inside into the dynamics of the model, we use the geometric singular perturbation theory to couple the fast and slow models from the full model. Finally, since the governing models are very complex, they cannot be solved analytically and hence we develop and analyze a special class of numerical methods to solve them. / South Africa

In this thesis the spectral properties of differential operators generated by the formally self-adjoint differential expression Τy = w⁻₁[(ry″)″ - (py′)′ + qy] are investigated. The main tools to be used are the theory of asymptotic integration and the Titchmarsh--Weyl M-matrix. Subject to certain regularity conditions on the coefficients asymptotic integration leads to estimates for the eigenfunctions of the corresponding differential equation Τy = zy. According to the theory of asymptotic integration the regularity conditions combine smoothness with decay, i.e. admissible coefficients are (in an appropriate sense) either short range or slowly varying. Knowledge of the asymptotics (x → ∞) of the solutions will then be used to determine the deficiency index and to derive properties of the M-matrix which is closely related to the spectral measure of an associated self-adjoint realization Τ. Consequently we can compute the multiplicity of the spectrum, locate the absolutely continuous spectrum and give conditions for the singular continuous spectrum to be empty. This generalizes classical results on second order operators.

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This thesis consists of two parts. In the first part, we study a class of special functions Aik (y), k = 2, 4, 6, ··· generalising the classical Airy function Ai(y) to higher orders and in the second part, we apply expressions and properties of Ai4(y) to spectral problem of a specific operator. The first part is however motivated by latter part. We establish regularity properties of Aik (y) and particularly show that Aik (y) is smooth, bounded, and extends to the complex plane as an entire function, and obtain pointwise bounds on Aik (y) for all k. Some analytic properties of Aik (y) are also derived allowing one to express Aik (y) as a finite sum of certain generalised hypergeometric functions. We further obtain full asymptotic expansions of Aik (y) and their first derivative Ai'(y) both for y > 0 and for y < 0. Using these expansions, we derive expressions for the negative real zeroes of Aik (y) and Ai'(y). Using expressions and properties of Ai4(y), we extensively study spectral properties of a non-local operator H whose physical interpretation is the massless relativistic quartic anharmonic oscillator in one dimension. Various spectral results for H are derived including estimates of eigenvalues, spectral gaps and trace formula, and a Weyl-type asymptotic relation. We study asymptotic behaviour, analyticity, and uniform boundedness properties of the eigenfunctions Ψn(x) of H. The Fourier transforms of these eigenfunctions are expressed in two terms, one involving Ai4(y) and another term derived from Ai4(y) denoted by Āi4(y). By investigating the small effect generated by Āi4(y) this work shows that eigenvalues λn of H are exponentially close, with increasing n Ε N, to the negative real zeroes of Ai4(y) and those of its first derivative Ai'4(y) arranged in alternating and increasing order of magnitude. The eigenfunctions Ψ(x) are also shown to be exponentially well-approximated by the inverse Fourier transform of Ai4(|y| - λn) in its normalised form.

In this thesis uniform asymptotic approximations of integrals are discussed. In order to derive these approximations, two well-known methods are used i.e., the saddle point method and the Bleistein method. To start with this, examples are given to demonstrate these two methods and a general idea of how to approach these techniques. The asymptotics of the hypergeometric functions with large parameters are discussed i.e., 2F1 (a + e1λ, b + e2λ c + e3λ ; z)where ej = 0,±1, j = 1, 2, 3 as |λ|→ ∞, which are valid in large regions of the complex z-plane, where a, b and c are fixed. The saddle point method is applied where the saddle point gives a dominant contributions to the integral representations of the hypergeometric functions and Bleistein’s method is adopted to obtain the uniform asymptotic approximations of some cases where the coalescence takes place between the critical points of the integrals. As a special case, the uniform asymptotic approximation of the hypergeometric function where the third parameter is large, is obtained. A new method to estimate the remainder term in the Bleistein method is proposed which is created to deal with new type of integrals in which the usual methods for the remainder estimates fail. Finally, using the asymptotic property of the hypergeometric function when the third parameter is large, the uniform asymptotic approximation of the monic Meixner Sobolev polynomials Sn(x) as n → ∞ , is obtained in terms of Airy functions. The asymptotic approximations for the location of the zeros of these polynomials are also discussed. As a limit case, a new asymptotic approximation for the large zeros of the classical Meixner polynomials is provided.