My notes before speaking at the panel:

I would like to focus on the questions related to "staying in touch with research community and opportunities for publishing academic papers".
When you are interviewing for a position in a company or industrial lab, they would definitely tell you that relations with academia and publishing is encouraged.
However, this won't be what you would be evaluated on at the end of the year in most places. 
You would be evaluated on your impact on company's either existing or emerging products.
So your main project in the company would be something that needs to enhance the company's products.
You won't be banned from working on a different and more research-focused project, but that has to be more like your side project.
You would have time to work for such a side project maybe one day of your work week or in your own time outside work. 
This can be a bit challenging to do, especially if you also want to have a life outside work.
However, it is not impossible. 
In a company, you would also have opportunities to get interns or utilize your existing academic relations to get some help with these type of projects.
Or your team-mates at work might also be interested in doing research on a similar problem so you can collaborate with them.
On the other hand, while working on your main project in the company, which targets company's benefits,
you would be designing and developing things that are novel and innovative most of the time.
You would have plenty of publishing material from this project as well.
The only thing is sometimes they would make you wait a bit till the product is out.
Or if you can put the pieces of this work in a context independent of a potential product,
you would still be able to publish about it, at least in industrial labs.
So even though, what you are working on might not make you feel as if you are doing research,
actually, you are doing research still. 
You just need to take some initiative sometimes in terms of pushing people around you to wrap some of its pieces up in an academic paper.
Because, when everyone focuses on releasing a product out, they might not be thinking about papers like you do so sometimes you need to take the initial steps for this process.
In addition to this, most companies would pay for you to go to at least one major conference a year even if you don't have any paper there.
There would be plenty of opportunities to be in program committees of various conferences as well.
So staying connected to the research community this way isn't hard.
To sum up what I have said so far, it is possible to still keep a decent publication record and stay in touch with the research community when you work for a company.
However, you would need to have some self-driven motivation for this.
There won't be an advisor to ping you from time to time to see if you are writing your paper.