The OP is including a lot of different concepts under the neural network umbrella. Things like restricted boltzmann machines and hierarchical temporal memory are technically neural networks, but many computer scientists would consider them to be different enough in approach to think of them separately. ie, you wouldn't say "let's use a type of neural network to solve this problem" you would probably say "let's use a restricted boltzmann machine".<p>It is true that these things are becoming more popular. I've found in practice that a modern computer scientist is still more likely to solve a simple learning problem with some form of regression, if only because it's faster than training a NN.
Rather than using Google scholar, I would suggest looking at papers in ICML, NIPS and Journal of Machine Learning Research.<p>For vision based research I would suggest CVPR and ICCV conference and IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence journal.
I have this impression that there are many more startups popping up that generally operating under the AI umbrella. Companies are doing things relating to medicine, finance, etc. There's even a couple on the May Who's Hiring post here on HN. Quite an exciting time. Seems like the AI Spring is in progress and we're coming up on Summer.
I don't think this is significant at all because of the information boom. As the Internet and Storage has boomed and become more cheap and available, more content and data is hosted on the web. More and more is indexed by Google. May be we need to adjust the stats graph that are based on Google Scholar with the inflation of data in the last decade.
Is there much commercialization of neural networks going on? I own NeuralNetwork.com but am not suited to turn it into a business. If anyone is in the space and is interested in using the category killer name, I'd love to talk.
Interesting that the trend isn't replicated on the web... yet: <a href="http://www.google.com/trends?q=neural+networks" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/trends?q=neural+networks</a><p>I wonder if there is a lag between academia and the web?
Might this be due to the explosion on neuroscience publications that are not related to artificial neural networks? There haven't been major breakthroughs in ANNs lately