I can give you some hot topics in my area which is machine vision. I don't know if these type of applications are able to be a thesis for software engineering.

- Attention in images or in scene (important for limiting the search space in images)

- Object detection/recognition (always hot, however mostly dominated by big companies)

- Applications of Deep Learning (such as self driving agents just by using images, chess, go agents, application of deep learning on control theory, agricultural applications,  etc.)

You can check any conference topics, start with workshop