Maybe not exactly what you seek, but Microsoft Research China does some really state of the art work in vision. Baidu (that Andrew Ng was affiliated with) also

Maybe not exactly what you seek, but Microsoft Research China does some really state of the art work in vision. Baidu (that Andrew Ng was affiliated with) also seems to have made really big strides with stuff like speech recognition. There are some serious credentials backing people working there, but all the news I've heard does come out from articles that seem to have a lot of hype behind it.