AI research and related topics and startups rarely make news. Is it really such a dead field? There's never any breakthroughs announced, and there's no grandiose research projects underway that I know of. I read every day how mobile social network platforms are being funded en masse in Silicon Valley while an entire branch of computing appears to be whithering away in the grips of academia. Are there any websites that try to track the different AI projects going on? Which books should someone fascinated in this field be reading to try stay up to date?