FWIW, waifu2x was inspired by this paper from researchers at Chinese University of Hong Kong and Microsoft Research Asia
http://arxiv.org/abs/1501.00092v3waifu2x is a great demonstration of this approach applied to a specific domain.
By coincidence, Flipboard's DNN approach was developed around the same time as the MSRA research in summer 2014.
I'm excited to see future research in applying deep learning to generative tasks. Some of the CNN music composition work is quite impressive.
