Hottest areas in computer science research?

Question

Disclaimer I am NOT looking for a Ph.D. topic, just curious what areas of research interests other programmers.

What areas do SO readers think are the hottest areas in computer science research right now? For example, back near the beginning of this decade, there was a big push for research in VoIP, along with heated debates on H.323 vs SIP, etc. Also during this time, the Honeynet project began. There was another question that piqued my interest, if you were going to pursue a (or a second) Ph.D. tomorrow, what area would you do research in?

From what I can gather with talking to friends who are currently in Ph.D. programs, one area that seems to be very hot right now is botnet research. Some of the node sizes are staggering:

The Dutch police found a 1.4 million node botnet. It has been estimated that up to one quarter of all personal computers connected to the internet may be part of a botnet.

And the end results can cripple the infrastructure.

Answer 1

This page has a short list of some "unsolved problems" in computer science. All of them are of course edging on the ambitious side. Still, I would undoubtedly consider them sensible and reasonably practical areas if I were going for a PhD now.

• Scheduling algorithm deadlines greater than periods
• Design a skilled go-playing program

And to expand on that:

• Improved natural language processing (NLP)

One of these should certainly be feasible to a sizable number of Comp Sci PHD students, I would think.

Now, if you were going into theoretical computer science, attempting to prove (or rather, explicitly disprove) the P vs. NP problem of complexity classes would certainly be an interesting (and very ambitious) topic to research. You would probably be asking for a lot of pain and little success, to be honest. Saying that, there is a prize oferred by the Clay Institute of a million dollars, so that would more than pay for your expenses over how many years it might take you. (You'd probably be given the Turing Award too, as a bonus.) As far as I know, this a problem for which a proof (or disproof) is considered to exist, so I wouldn't be surprised if this were accomplished in the near future.

Answer 2

Ph.D research takes years (4-5 in general, if not more), so looking for the 'hottest' subject is really a dumb rule to pick a Ph.D topic. One should pick the research topic which interests you the most, which makes you want to dig really deep into the material because you think what you can contribute with your research can really help the topic forward.

Answer 3

Parallellism perhaps... Using those cores in an optimal and safe way is not an easy problem to solve.

Answer 4

I think there's still some interesting work to be done in Computer Vision.

Answer 5

I've always been a big fan of AI research. (a bit broad, but I'm a big fan)

Lets face it, the biggest societal changes we are about to undergo are going to be the result of AI. In particular, the areas of pattern recognition (visual, audio) seem set to grow by leaps and bounds as computing power sufficient to the task can be put into small power efficient packages.

The world is becoming increasingly automated and highly efficient with robots and AI. We build our machines, fight our wars, police our streets, and decide how to distribute resources (just-in-time store delivery) all with AI related technology.

Answer 6

I think computer processor, with the speed of light.

Answer 7

Spam filters

Answer 8

Dependability. With more and more computer systems in our lives, trusting what they do is of prime importance. In particular Security is a hot area, with viruses, spam, phishing, and many other threats.

Answer 9

Semantic Web and Web Science and the hot topics in the department where I'm doing my PhD right now.

Web Science is particularly interesting as its inter-disciplinary and there's a lot of cool research starting to appear from people from non-CompSci backgrounds researching into the Web from a completely different point of view and spotting really cool stuff. For example there's Noshir Contractor's research on Social Networks which found that people playing the online game Everquest tended to play with people located within a 50km radius despite being able to play with people anywhere in the world. See his Keynote from WebSci'09 on this - http://www.websci09.org/keynotes/2009%203%20Web%20Science%202009.pptx - or from the WSRI Repository - http://journal.webscience.org/258/ (should both be same thing)

But I agree with Frans that you should pick your topic based on what you are passionate about, computer science moves so fast sometimes that if you pick the hot topic then everyone is doing it and there isn't room to do anything original.

Answer 10

In general, Machine Learning. See "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data."

Answer 11

Information management is an active field, that is databases, which expands into XML DBs, column-oriented DBs, mobile distributed DBs, and so on...

To find out the current trends in research you should check the papers from some recent research conferences. For databases/information mangement it would be ACM SIGMOD, EDBT, ICDT, VLDB.

Answer 12

As always ethics, ubiquitous computing is already starting to have major affect on people's lives already.

Answer 13

Signal and Image processing. Applications are for for robotics, medicine, biometrics, digital vision, image and data compression.....

Answer 14

Barbara Liskov says (2008 ACM Turing Award Recipient) Cloud computing

"....What I am very interested in today is about storage in the cloud....I think that this is going to become the universal way of doing business....My major research focus today is what are the properties that a storage service has to provide in order for me to be really happy with it. I've been interested in how to ensure that the data we put into this storage service is always there when we need it and never gets lost...but I am also interested in the confidentiality of the information. That's my major focus right now...."

Answer 15

Data security and encryption are two that really jump out at me.

Answer 16

All things you named are technology. I don't say that aren't intresting or bleeding edge, but it is not what is meant by research in CS.

As already named, parallelism is one of hottest topics. But there also more general thinks as machine learning, machine vision, nlp. What is probably called AI field(today it isn't a hype name for these fields).

Answer 17

Multi-touch interfaces have been become quite vogue in the past few years. After Jeff Han demoed his multi-touch interface at TED, there has been a good number of people trying to use it for "real" work.

The use of non-traditional interfaces is gaining momentum. Also, many of the interfaces that were once dreamed are now becoming technologically possible.

Multi-touch and user interaction is one of my research interests and as I have explored the field I have found it to be quite vibrant.

Answer 18

This might not be the stuff of hot computer science research really so feel free to shrug it off but I personally would like to see more happening in EEG and neuro-feedback.

Any mass market technologies in this area could really take us into the realm of hacking our own minds. And by hacking I don't mean breaching but rather sitting here and looking at our own brain-waves as useful analytics charts and trying to achieve the same brain state happiness through an alternate neural paths. (See Dilbert creator remapping brain).

Applying such research in a social setting on groups would provide some very interesting insights into the mind.

Answer 19

Natural Language Processing.

Computer vision.

Formal verification such as Model checking. High parallelism makes the debugging nearly impossible because there are very large permutations of interleaving patterns. Model checking is one possible method to automatically verify that the software (or it's logic/model) is bug free.

Answer 20

How about Content Based Image Retrieval? It is mostly a research area, but there are some new products/systems that are exploring this technology. An example is google similar image search.

Answer 21

I'd say natural language processing and machine translation, speech recognition and artificial intelligence.

I was hoping to create a mashup of existing tech to quickly create a simple AI one could have a conversation with. 3 months later I'm only now starting to understand what it is I'm trying to create. I'll let you know how it goes in a few years!

Answer 22

One topic I can think of is Brain-computer interface.