THE 2012 OBERWOLFACH MEETINGS ON COMPLEXITY THEORY
LACONIC and PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS OF ODED GOLDREICH

My own subjective impression is that this meeting
was very successful. In particular, all plenary presentations
were interrupted numerous times by questions and comments from
the audience, creating a very imformal and open atmosphere
of extensive interaction, of the type that is the raeson d'etre 
of this meeting.

In addition, the plenary open problem session,
organized by Boaz Barak, was very successful.
I usually oppose open problem sessions,
because they usually evolve into an long array
of short statements that focus on technical issues
and fail to put them in a wider conceptual context.
In contrast, this open problem session featured a selection
of a few issues, where in each case the general conceptual
context was discussed and the "open problem" was actually
a discussion of the boundary of our understanding of that issue.

Naturally, the presentations that I found most interesting are
those who are closest to my own areas of interest. A partial
list includes:

* Ryan Williams: His ACC lower bound (with current perspectives) 
* Raghu Meka: Progress on unconditional pseudorandom generators 
* Benny Applebaum: one-way functions vs pseudorandom generators in NC0 
* Guy Rothblum: Delegating Computation -- Recent progress and challenges 
* Boaz Barak: Update on the Unique Games Conjecture 
* Zvika Brakerski: Homomorphic encryption 
* Moritz Hardt: Differential Privacy 
* Anup Rao: Overview of Interactive Information Complexity based work 
* Shafi Goldwasser: Functional Encryption and Reusable Garbled Circuits
* Zvika Brakerski: Modulus-Dimension Trade-Offs for LWE 

But, of course, I was intrigued also by several presentations that
are not within these confines, including the recent progress
on matrix multiplication (by Virginia Vassilevska Williams
and Chris Umans) and a survey of Multiplicity Codes 
(by Shubhangi Saraf).