Opportunities in Academia with a CS degree, mainly related with Machine Learning?

Short version: Finishing my degree in CS, unsatisfactory experience in private consulting, trying to find out possibilities in academia.

Long version: I am finishing my degree in Computer Science. One year ago I did an internship at an IT consultancy company and the experience was neither satisfactory nor enjoyable, although I had the opportunity to learn some useful concepts at expense of really poor working conditions. From this previous experience I became skeptic about developing my career in private sector, at least in this in particular. In addition, I do not like to have to develop applications on customer's demand using technologies imposed by them. On the other hand in my last year of CS I started to learn about Information Retrieval and Machine Learning, as those topics were related with an optional subject and my final project, and I think they are really interesting fields. For this reason, I would like to know what options I have when I finish my studies, mainly related with those topics but not strictly limited to: for sure there are a lot of vibrant fields that I am not aware of! I was looking therefore for some guidance on the possibilities that I will have if I want to go for academia. I live in Spain and I do not wonder moving of country, if that matters.