There are a slew of fascinating recent advances in CS and I discover more with every passing semester, but for brevity I will pick three things that have been occupying my mindspace as of late.

1. It seems that lazy functional programming languages (like Haskell) may provide a basis for a serious improvement in more robust natural language processing. A survey paper: [http://cs.uwindsor.ca/~richard/PUBLICATIONS/NLI_LFP_SURVEY_D...]

2. Semi-Human Instinctive AI, a new dynamic, nondeterministic decision-making process, seems to be the new hotness in robotics/learning algorithms. In it, a given agent is given a set of basic behaviors ("instincts") that it hones with both open and closed learning methods in a problem space. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi_Human_Instinctive_Artifici...]

3. Anatoly Shalyto's Automata-based programming, using finite state machines to describe program behavior, seems to have a lot of potential. It attempts to view programs from the context of engineering control theory, which opens the door to the use of powerful techniques from dynamical systems in mathematics.