While at the conference this week I met up with an professor and he had an
interesting proposal. Essentially the idea would be they could build
containers (following our OSS requirements) that we could deploy, and for
some small percent of search traffic pass our top 100 results to their
container for reranking.
Certainly more details would have to be worked out, but does this seem
reasonable? Overall I still think working directly with academics can be
beneficial to our own work, although I'm not sure what our overhead would
be.