  The XVII International Symposium on Very High Energy Cosmic Ray Interactions,
held in August of 2012 in Berlin, was the first one in the history of the
Symposium, where a plethora of high precision LHC data with relevance for
cosmic ray physics was presented. This report aims at giving a brief summary of
those measurements and it discusses their relevance for observations of high
energy cosmic rays. Enormous progress has been made also in air shower
observations and in direct measurements of cosmic rays, exhibiting many more
structure in the cosmic ray energy spectrum than just a simple power law with a
knee and an ankle. At the highest energy, the flux suppression may not be
dominated by the GZK-effect but by the limiting energy of a nearby source or
source population. New projects and application of new technologies promise
further advances also in the near future. We shall discuss the experimental and
theoretical progress in the field and its prospects for coming years.
