JavaOne 2014 in September 2014 in San Francisco

Neo4j will be presenting on its graph query engine for graph databases. Gradle build automation will also be discussed.

Project Valhalla as the Proving Ground for Prototyping Java 9 Features

JDK 9 is scheduled for 2016. Valhalla provides a testbed to trial new features as part of Open JDK. One of these is generics (removing type erasure). Brian Goetz's thoughts on these are here.

Road to Clojure (PC and JC)

Clojure is a LISP dialect for the JVM. It also allows you to call Java code from LISP. Books on Clojure include:

Programming Clojure, by Stuart Halloway and Aaron Bedra, available from the Pragmatic Bookshelf
The Joy of Clojure, by Michael Fogus and Chris Houser (May 2014)

Knowing the standard Java APIs is useful when learning Clojure.

LISP stands for List Processing and was a favourite with AI researchers back in the day, having been invented by John McCarthy in 1958. He published his design in CACM in 1960.