Progress in Lifting and Applications in Lower Bounds (Invited Talk)

Ever since Yao introduced the communication complexity model in 1979, it has played a pivotal role in our understanding of limitations for a wide variety of problems in Computer Science. In this talk, I will present the lifting method, whereby communication lower bounds are obtained by lifting much simpler lower bounds. I will show how lifting theorems have been used to solve many open problems in a variety of areas of computer science, including: circuit complexity, proof complexity, combinatorial optimization (size of linear programming formulations), cryptography (linear secret sharing schemes), game theory and privacy. At the end of the talk, I will sketch the proof of a unified lifting theorem for deterministic and randomized communication (joint with Arkadev Chattopadyhay, Yuval Filmus, Sajin Koroth, and Or Meir.) 2012 ACM Subject Classification Theory of computation → Communication complexity