Once in a while, a good paper appears in the endless river of PhD thesises, one that stands out because it's likely to impact the near future. This time it is Solid Texture Synthesis from 2D Examplars . Check out the video and, if you are into computer graphics, read the 22mb paper.
In case you are wondering, I no longer actively keep track of research papers. I ran into this one while researching the current state of art in realtime in-game editing. Answer: recent progress is rather disappointing.
Update: Pete Shirley's blog seems to be a good source for pointer to graphics-related papers. A single cascading topic focused search will reap more results than one has time to read but it would be nice to have a federation of insightful blogs specializing in computer graphics.