It is 2016. Deep learning is everywhere. Image recognition can be considered kind of solved by convolutional neural networks and my research interests gravitate towards neural networks with memories and reinforcement learning.
Specifically, in a paper showed by Google Deepmind, it has been shown that it is possible to achieve human or even superhuman-level performance on a variety of Atari 2600 (a home game console released in 1977) games using a simple reinforcement learning algorithm called Deep Q-Neural Network. All that done by just observing the gameplay. That caught my attention.