“There is a continuing and welcome trend amongst large, modern technology companies like Google, Yahoo and Amazon to publish details of their systems at academic conferences. One of the problems that researchers at universities have is making a convincing case that their ideas would work well in the real world, since no matter how many assumptions are made there really is no substitute for field testing, and the infrastructure, workloads and data just aren’t available to do that effectively. However, companies have infrastructure to burn and a genuine use-case with genuine users. Using their experience and data to discover what does and doesn’t work, and what is and is not really important provides an invaluable feedback loop to researchers.” source...