For people who aren't Ph.D. students, it may help to contact a local CS department and see what they have going on. There should at least be a grad student colloquium meeting once a week or so. I attended that at Penn a few times, although it was too far above me to really follow (lots of PL theory). More recently I've been going to a Database Reading Group at Portland State University (http://datalab.cs.pdx.edu/dbrg/index.php), which is a great way to get a taste of current research in that niche. Databases are less rarefied, too. :-)