"We’ve built a very simple application on our labs website where you can listen to music and help us improve the state of the art in tempo estimation."
No. We are giving you data that you use to improve your tempo estimation algorithm. If you wanted to improve the state of the art, you would share the data you collect.
In particular, you note the MIREX competition (http://www.music-ir.org/mirex) earlier in your post. Share your data with the MIREX competition, and make it open for use by others, if you want to improve the state of the art.