For the last several years, the “fashionable” area in computer science research was Machine Learning. This makes sense from an economic point of view, since the rise of on-line giants such as Google, Facebook and Amazon has very much been precipitated by their ability to serve advertisers through better data analysis.
But now that Facebook is rebranding itself, I wonder whether the fashions might shift. Experiential Computing might become the new Machine Learning. As its potential for economic transformation becomes understood, funding for EC might start flowing more readily, and be easier to come by.
We shall see.