What are the hottest areas for CS Research? (Based on Google Research 2013)

 What are some of the hottest areas of research in Computer Science at the moment (August 2013)? And at which universities is this research being carried out?

The answers are subjective by definition, but looking at the numbers behind the Google Research awards announced yesterday can provide some quick insights. Going by the grants as a proxy for what are where are the current hottest areas of research, here's what we get:

A total of 105 grants were awarded. 81 universities in all got the awards, in 19 different research areas.

Here are the top research areas:

As far as institutions go, MIT, Georgia Tech and CMU got 5 grants each, with Cornell and Standford getting 3 each.




The R code I used to generate this can be found here. In case anyone is interested in performing their own analysis, I've also included the CSV data file.