I attended an interesting talk at UCLA by Susan Wilhite on lean UX research. She approaches UX design from the standpoint of ethnographic research and talks about ways to do it in a "lean" fashion, emphasizing quick iterations, small batches, prototyping, etc. Her video and SlideShare are above, and my notes are below. I only wish the talk had more real-world examples of projects and research phases she went through for them so we could see it more explicitly (it was somewhat high-level and academic).

Focus on value

Compile your knowledge
What do you know
How do you know it
What does it mean

Build a spine
What is your core
What is unnecessary
What is your niche

Lean != launch crap

Put rubber on road instead of generating documentation
Cafe testing

Arguing without making it personal is important
"Strong opinions, weakly held"

Field trip coordinator
Immersive journalist

Psychotherapy + acting exercises

Ride the chaos, little documentation

Researchers vs. designers; is it ok for a researcher to not be a maker?

Build, measure, learn (lean ux)
Think, make, check (LUXr)
Learn, measure, build (lean startup circle)

Lots of UX research for medical instruments 

Balsamiq < Axure < Omnigraffle
Know vizio well
"Clearly"

Books:
Jeff Gothelf, Lean UX
Rachel Hinman, The Mobile Frontier
Scott Berkun

Sites:
UXMatters
SmashingMag