What is the impact of software engineering research on current practices in industry? In this paper, I report on my direct experience as a PhD post-doc working in software engineering research projects, and then spending the following five years as an engineer in two different companies (the first one being the same I worked in collaboration with during my post-doc). Given a background in software engineering research, what cutting-edge techniques and tools from academia did I use in my daily work when developing and testing the systems of these companies? Regarding validation and verification (my main area of research), the answer is rather short: as far as I can tell, only FindBugs. In this paper, I report on why this was the case, and discuss all the challenging, complex open problems we face in industry and which somehow are “neglected” in the academic circles. In particular, I will first discuss what actual tools I could use in my daily work, such as JaCoCo and Selenium. Then, I will discuss the main open problems I faced, particularly related to environment simulators, unit and web testing. After that, popular topics in academia are presented, such as UML, regression and mutation testing. Their lack of impact on the type of projects I worked on in industry is then discussed. Finally, from this industrial experience, I provide my opinions about how this situation can be improved, in particular related to how academics are evaluated, and advocate for a greater involvement into open-source projects.
 Data mining (DM) research has successfully developed advanced DM techniques and algorithms over the last few decades, and many organisations have great expectations to take more benefit of their data warehouses in decision making. Currently, the strong focus of most DM-researchers is still only on technology-oriented topics. Commonly the DM research has several stakeholders, the major of which can be divided into internal and external ones each having their own point of view, and which are at least partly conflicting. The most important internal groups of stakeholders are the DM research community and academics in other disciplines. The most important external stakeholder groups are managers and domain experts who have their own utility-based interests to DM and DM research results. In this paper we discuss these practice-oriented points of view towards DM research and suggest broader discussions inside the DM research community about who should do that kind of research. We bring in the discussion several topics developed in the information systems (IS) discipline and show some similarities between IS and DM systems. DM systems have also their own peculiarities and we conclude that researchers who take into account human and organisational aspects related to DM systems need to have also some understanding about DM. This makes us suggest that the research area inside the DM community should be made broader than the current heavily technology-oriented one. Introduction: Although concerns have been raised about industry support of continuing medical education (CME), there are few published reports of academia-industry collaboration in the field. We describe and evaluate Pri-Med, a CME experience for primary care clinicians developed jointly by the Harvard Medical School (HMS) and M C Communications. Methods: Since 1995, 19 Pri-Med conferences have been held in four cities, drawing more than 100,000 primary care clinicians. The educational core of each Pri-Med conference is a 3-day Harvard course, “Current Clinical Issues in Primary Care.” Course content is determined by a faculty committee independent of any commercial influence. Revenues from multiple industry sources flow through M C Communications to the medical school as an educational grant to support primary care education, Pri-Med also offers separate pharmaceutical company–funded symposia. Results: Comparing the two educational approaches during four conferences, 221 HMS talks and 103 symposia were presented. The HMS course covered a wide range with 133 topics; the symposia focused on 30 topics, most of which were linked to recently approved new therapeutic products manufactured by the funders. Both the course and the symposia were highly rated by attendees. Discussion: When CME presentations for primary care physicians receive direct support from industry, the range of offered topics is narrower than when programs are developed independently of such support. There appear to be no differences in the perceived quality of presentations delivered with and without such support. Our experience suggests that a firewall between program planners and providers of financial support will result in a broader array of educational subjects relevant to the field of primary care. Aim: To identify which factors are important barriers to effective collaboration between Japanese academia and industry in the field of regenerative medicine. Methods: In November–December 2006, in-person semistructured interviews were conducted with representatives from nine Japanese companies that are engaged in developing regenerative medicine products in collaboration with academia and two academic scientists with the successful collaborative experiences with companies. Results & conclusions: The major barriers to collaboration relate to the inadequacy of particular systems in academic institutions (particularly technology licensing organizations and mobility between industry and academia), the knowledge deficit of academic personnel with respect to industry, the inadequacy of particular governmental support systems and the Japanese public's view of these collaborations, which has resulted in overly strict conflict of interest guidelines. We suggest some approaches to overcome these barriers. The development and commercialization of diagnostic assays is distinct from that of therapeutic drugs in many important respects; for example, there are more variable regulatory requirements and reduced outside investments for diagnostics. The diagnostics industry has a pro-collaborative stance, because there is considerable mutual benefit in working in partnership with university or government researchers. However, there are substantial barriers to industry-academic collaborations. A Clinical and Translational Science Awards Industry Forum titled “Promoting Efficient and Effective Collaborations Among Academia, Government, and Industry” was held in February 2010, and a session at this forum was organized to list some of the most important barriers to diagnostics development and to discuss some possible solutions.