[dkarl]

This type of work could, eventually, directly inform practice.

Are there any problems taken directly from practice that complexity researchers are working on and using as context to define shortcomings in existing theory? Maybe that's what he's talking about, expanding on theory that "could, eventually, directly inform practice" and calling that "applied research" instead of tackling practical problems directly.

[through_17]

Yeah, a lot of the work on average-case SAT is directly informed by what industrial benchmarks look like.

Further from "core complexity," a lot of the work on machine learning primitives is also directly informed by instances from practice. See the "manifold hypothesis" :

https://deepai.org/machine-learning-glossary-and-terms/manif...