Part of LLVM is an interest in correctness. I've seen more of an interest in these areas in research as well. For example, there was even a recent research highlight in an ACM magazine about "Formal Verification of a Realistic Compiler": http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/publi/compcert-CACM.pdf
Plus, newer companies like Coverity (http://www.coverity.com/html/research-library.html) bring a sense of credibility to a practice that hasn't had much traction in the industry.
I think all of these ideas can come together to make something quite useful. But I suppose bringing it all together is the hard part :)
Update: I also saw lots of cool associations to the Self Programming Language (http://research.sun.com/self/language.html), which includes some great research, especially in their paper "Self: The Power of Simplicity": http://research.sun.com/self/papers/self-power.html