[warner25]

Regarding AI and distributed systems, this might not be what you have in mind, but take a look at federated learning. I'm currently a computer science PhD candidate at a small school, and a couple of our graduates in the past year worked on the fundamentals and applications of federated learning.

I came into this PhD program thinking that I wanted to work on stuff like the distributed databases that you listed, or the stuff they're built on like clock synchronization. I did my master's degree in 2017-2018 and I was fascinated by an "advanced databases" class that covered these things. Unfortunately, nobody in my department works on such things, and I agree with you that I don't hear much about that area anymore.

[civicsquid]

Good suggestion! I’ve seen federated learning come up before but have not explored it much.

This seems like a good direction for sure.