Anything to do with transfer learning (the 2013 Zero-Shot Learning Through Cross-Modal Transfer[2] paper is a good place to start)
The increasing amount of demos around using NNs to generate "things" that look kinda-almost "intelligent". I can't point at a paper, but Andrej Karpathy demo of generating Shakespere-like writing, "Wikipedia" pages and "C" code in The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks[3] is the kind of thing I'm talking about.
The beginnings of work around goal-seeking. The (now Google) DeepMind Atari demo[4] and Marl/O[5]
Finally, the work being done on making this stuff usable by programmers (Torch etc).
[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.3916
[2] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.3666.pdf
[3] http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/