My first research interest was the pajama job, where you can work from home and you make money before you even wake up. I successfully had that job when I was 15.
My next research interest was allowing everyone to have a personal home page, and my contribution was making guides that allowed middle-school and high-school aged students to create web sites. I started this back in 1996, and through the thousands of us who put in time, we ended up with networks like Myspace and Facebook years later. (Now nearly everyone has a "home page" in a way.)
In 1997, before my cancer diagnosis, my research interest shifted into handheld entertainment and education. We had the new Palm Pilot, which finally had an Internet connection. Back then, there was no "iTunes Credit" model, so the industry was delayed pretty much until Apple's iPhone came out a decade later, and now we have great handheld entertainment and educational apps for anyone's pocket.
My final two research interests are (1) speeding up collaborative medical research, so we can cure diseases faster, and (2) creating algorithms and interfaces to allow customized tablet-based education for school-children who may have trouble learning through the standard book-lecture model.
Based on the 10-year cycles of research, I suspect we'll have cures to most cancers by 2020, and we'll also be pretty close to saving our bankrupt education system. If people work together.