Neural networks have been untrendy since the late 90s. This has decreased research since then. The general opinion of practical people now is that nnets with

Neural networks have been untrendy since the late 90s. This has decreased research since then. The general opinion of practical people now is that nnets with a single hidden layer are one of the major workhorses in the classification/regression toolbox. Neural nets with many hidden layers (needed to really advance the state of the art) are still a work in progress. There has been a lot of work on "deep" networks, usually focusing on unsupervised training, and then either sticking an support vector machine on the end, or finally training a single supervised layer. Practical people don't really use that stuff yet.