Research topic in Machine Learning

I am applying to a MS program and want to concentrate on Machine learning as one of my research areas. However, I'm very new to machine learning. My day-to-day work doesn't require machine learning but I've been interested in the concept of learning from data. To gain further knowledge in the subject I've tried going though:

• Ciml.info
• (few papers) http://mlrg.cs.brown.edu/

In my statement of purpose I would like to mention that one of my Academic goals is to gain further knowledge of ML. However, since ML is a broad topic I think that might be very vague.

So I wanted to ask suggestions from the community of few interesting aspects of ML that could be taken on as research topics.

My areas of Interest in subtopics are (in layman's speak): I'm sure there are others I don't even know about...yet

• Object/Pattern recognition using ML
• Ranking based learning
• Scaling a ML solution