Not quite in the realm of search-spaces & NP-complete problems, but here’s an interesting CS research link you may find interesting:

http://www.dspguide.com/

The thrust of it is showing how to use various analysis techniques on signals and images. The book is free (unless you want a hardcopy), and each chapter can be downloaded if it interests you. Chapters ~2-5 are rather dry (#1 is an intro), but they’re readable if you want a refresher on stats and other mathy stuff used in the book. The stuff I found most interesting starts around chapter 24, and the chapters before it that introduce material used in 24. They start to show how the convolution and fourier analysis can be used to compare two similar images to see how closely their major features resemble eachother.

Later on in the book they also start to go into how the Z-transform (the discrete version of the laplace transform) can be used in signal analysis as well. There’s also a chapter on neural networks (yay!).

Anyway, you should hop on IM sometime and tell me how things are going in Boston :)