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If industry could provide better platforms (up to date, not hand me downs or neutered versions of their real product) then I think you might see better forms of this research.

For example, I'd love to improve search relevance, but w/o having access to Google's search engine to build on, it's pretty hard. That's my suggestion. :-)

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While I agree in general that opening up opportunities for academic-industry collaboration is good, I don't think it's practical for academics to work on problems at true industry scale. Academics don't have access to the resources, personnel, or funding required to do that kind of work. An academic lab can do many things of relevance to industry -- but not everything.

Google recently open sourced its TensorFlow plstform specifically to enable researchers (and others) to build upon and improve it -- trying to avoid the problem with MapReduce (where a bunch of clones came out that were, at least initially, inferior to the original).

It would be really nice if they would go ahead and release the Google version of MapReduce now that they've learned their lesson. It's not too late for everyone to learn from the original, and it's no longer a competitive advantage now that anyone can run a Hadoop job on AWS on demand.

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