[nextos]

Programming language theory and formal verification have been relatively hot during the last 10-15 years and show no signs of slowdown. Still, a relatively niche area.

Also the intersection of CS, probability and statistics is a very interesting area to work on. Less trendy than deep ML, but really practical. See e.g. Stan, Pyro, Andrew Gelman's books, etc.

[cholantesh]

Thanks for the insight. My Software Quality prof gifted me a copy of one of Gelman's texts but I haven't had time to take it in; I should change that...

It's weird to me that formal verification isn't more widely used; I would think it would be common at least in safety critical systems development.