First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Prof. Jennifer E. Michaels. I am most appreciative of your guidance over the last four years, from the basics of elastic waves to both short- and long-term career advice. I have grown a tremendous amount, both profes-sionally and personally, and am deeply grateful for your mentorship, patience, and support. I would also like to thank my Ph.D. committee for their valuable insight and sugges-

methods for phase retrieval

RECHERCHES Elastographie par ondes de cisaillement

Abstract Basic ideas of rough set theory were proposed by Zdzis law Pawlak [85, 86] in the early 1980’s. In the ensuing years, we have witnessed a systematic, world–wide growth of interest in rough sets and their applications. The main goal of rough set analysis is induction of approximations of con-cepts. This main goal is motivated by the basic fact, constituting also the main problem of KDD, that languages we may choose for knowledge description are incomplete. A fortiori, we have to describe concepts of interest (features, proper-ties, relations etc.) not completely but by means of their reflections (i.e. approx-imations) in the chosen language. The most important issues in this induction process are: – construction of relevant primitive concepts from which approximations of more complex concepts are assembled, – measures of inclusion and similarity (closeness) on concepts, – construction of operations producing complex concepts from the primitive ones.

First, I would like to thank my advisors Prof. Gal A. Kaminka and Dr. David Sarne for their excellent guidance and constant support in the past two years. I learned quite a bit about scientific research, all thanks to their great instruction. Working with them was a real pleasure, not only on the professional level, but on the personal level as well. Thanks to my colleagues and friends from the Bar-Ilan University in general, and MAVERICK lab in particular, for the great time we had together. Special thanks to Gabriella Melamed, MAVERICK lab manager, for assisting with administra-tive issues, and in particular for helping with the arrangements for the experiment. I also wish to thank Tal-Oron Gilad from Ben-Gurion University, for providing us with a He-brew translation of the NASA-TLX questionnaire. Thanks to my dear family for their support and encouragement, and for enabling me to com-plete this work. Thanks to my girlfriend for her patience and understanding. Finally, I would like to thank my grandfather, who never ceased to encourage me throughout this journey.

I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Torsten Braun, head of the Computer Network and Distributed Systems group (RVS), for supervising this work and for his insightful advises. Prof. Dr. Torsten Braun encouraged and motivated me to publish my research results and he provided me the opportunity to present the work on various conferences, for which I thank him. I would also like to thank Prof. Dr. Roger Wattenhofer, responsible for the Koreferat of this work. Also, Prof. Dr. Oscar Nierstrasz who was willing to be the co-examinator of this work deserves many thanks. Many thanks go to my colleagues of the RVS group and of the IAM for our various interesting discussions about all kinds of topics and for making the institute a very pleasant and friendly place to work at. Special thanks go to David Steiner, Marc Steinemann, Matthias Scheidegger, Florian Baumgartner, Ruy De Oliveira, and Attila Weyland. There are many students who worked with me and helped a lot in developing and implementing. Among them I especially thankful to Thomas Bernoulli,