Hey there,
As a part of my masters thesis, I worked on how to mine Bitcoins faster and in a more efficient manner. The final result was that we were able to achieve a 38% speedup against traditional mining. A Swedish Mining company claims 30% speedup and has kept it a secret. But we have decided to make it open source and have finally publised our work which can be found here:

"The Unreasonable Fundamental Incertitudes Behind Bitcoin Mining"
http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.7935

Implementing these improvements will allow the Bitcoin network to save millions of dollars every year in electricity bills!

I had to post this here as I am new to the forum(but obviously not new to Bitcoin mining)!

Happy reading and let me know what you think!