Comment by nl

There's been significant progress in data science competitions (Kaggle etc).

Not so much parsing of the problem itself, but building generic frameworks where - given data and a target variable - it will work out the type of problem (eg classification vs regression) and develop a predictive model without human intervention.

ICML has had workshops for the last two years on this problem[1][2]

[1] https://sites.google.com/site/automl2016/

[2] https://sites.google.com/site/automlwsicml15/