[brent]

Well, if you're interested in machine learning NIPS was last week.

http://books.nips.cc/nips21.html

There were several papers near applied areas like text classification, breaking audio captchas, and even brain machine interfacing. However, even the theoretical papers usually come with examples (e.g. image classification) that show optimistic results. If you were doing any learning task that is definitely the place to find the state of the art.