This is an effort to get some discussion going.
I remember starting grad school and coming across reddit posts with themes like, “What research area will be hot in the next 10 years?”, etc. In retrospect, the comments there were not very informed (talk of graphical models and bayesian non-parametrics). But, the heart of these posts is talking about a research area that you find exciting.
So, tell us what research area is currently exciting to you. Are you starting a new job, project, or graduate program to work on it?
I had the pleasure of conducting research into self-supervised learning (SSL) for computer vision.
What stood out to me was the simplicity of the SSL algorithms combined with the astonishing performance of the self-supervisedly trained models after supervised fine-tuning.
Also the fact that SSL works across tasks and domains, e.g., text generation, image generation, semantic segmentation…