THE 1998 OBERWOLFACH MEETINGS ON COMPLEXITY THEORY
LACONIC and PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS OF ODED GOLDREICH

My feeling is that the meeting's highlight was the novel
connection between randomness extractors and pseudorandom generators,
discovered a few months earlier by Luca Trevisan.
Unfortunately, Luca could not attend the meeting,
and so his work was presented by me.

According to my recall, additional highlights of the meeting included
-- Danielle's sqrt(2) inapproximability factor for SVP.
-- Salil's survey of the study of Statistical Zero-Knowledge (SZK).
-- David's intriguing leader election protocol, which inspired
   Uri to present a totally different protocols a couple of days later.
   (Another case of research progress obtained during the meeting
    referred to reductions among lattice problems (SVP to CVP).)
In addition, I guess I must mention
Ran's separation of the Monotone NC Hierarchy,
derandomization based on uniform assumptions (presented by Avi),
and Amnon's dispersers.

[written: May 2006]