[santaclaus]

Adobe's research group in Seattle is pretty separated off from the core of the company down in San Jose. The researchers there don't have academic professor levels of do what ever you want freedom, but a lot of their work doesn't look like it even comes close to being associated with any of Adobe's products.

[junyanz]

I actually did two internship there. The Seattle lab did ship many new features like content-aware fill, shake reduction introduced in Photoshop CC 2015. The researchers there also has lots of freedom to explore different directions not directly related to the products, and it turns out that many of them will become a new feature of products within a few years.