Machine learning: http://angstro.com/ (this isn't solely my project; I'm only doing a minority of the work)
Numerical algorithms, digital signal processing: a bit at ERIM
I can't say I've done anything very interesting with distributed computing, real-time systems programming, natural language processing, or operations research.
An older friend of mine made millions from an RTOS he wrote in the 80s. He also wrote his own tcp/ip stack, cross assemblers, built his own ICE debuggers and other stuff. However, he knows very little else :-P He is almost always surprised by "what computers can do". Specializing did something strange to this man; he does the impossible and remains ignorant of the trivial. He only programs in C and Assembly languages but was surprised to discover there were syntax-highliting editors for assembly. He knows most algorithms that we toss around in conversation in chip form; to him MPEG, AVI, MD5, and SHA1 are all silicon things, never "written". I taught him what a "packer" was for executable binaries.
Uh, I mean I searched to see if there were any obvious browser exploits being propagated from the pages. I can't rule out the possibility of something subtle but I didn't notice anything.
Embedded systems: http://canonical.org/~kragen/light_sensing/
Software reverse engineering: http://canonical.org/~kragen/demo/klappquadrat.html
Compiler construction: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/urscheme/ http://github.com/kragen/peg-bootstrap http://github.com/kragen/stoneknifeforth
Machine learning: http://angstro.com/ (this isn't solely my project; I'm only doing a minority of the work)
Numerical algorithms, digital signal processing: a bit at ERIM
I can't say I've done anything very interesting with distributed computing, real-time systems programming, natural language processing, or operations research.