The 'Joy' of Double Rejection

Hell ya! Today's entry is about the 'joy' of double rejection. I bet many of you have been rejected before or probably I should say unsuccessful rather than that nasty word. There is no joy of being rejected of course. I my previous post I talked about how was my feeling after my ICPR paper has been rejected. In fact, I said I managed to get better results. Well, it was true. But the saddest part is as soon as I posted the entry, I received an email regarding to my MIUA paper decision. I must say it was the earliest paper decision I have every received in the last two years. In all conferences I have attended or submitted a paper before, all of them extended the 'Author Notification' date to one or two days late. Initially when I open my uni email, I got an email with a header something like 'Decision paper number 49' and I thought it can't be because it was about 3 days earlier than the date posted on the conference's website. Then I slowly opened it and so scared to read the email. What I did instead is looking for any 'happy words' such as 'delightful', 'congratulations', 'pleased', etc. But you know what? I didn't find any of these words but I found the word 'regret'! Oh Shit!!! as soon as I saw this I said to myself this is another unlucky paper. Oh!!! I was really disappointed and I can feel my blood was boiling that time. I can feel my vein kicking and pumping off my red blood to my brain which caused millions of questions. For the first few minutes, it was really really hard to accept the fact that my paper has been rejected (after my ICPR paper has been rejected recently). I was so fucking upset but after half an hour my blood pressure went down. I think if I had measured my blood pressure in the first a few minutes it went up to 180/90 which is very very dangerous (I could be dead after reading the email LOL!).

I read the feedback from the reviewers. The same to ICPR, one reviewer accepted it and the other two rejected it. Next I read every single line of their comments to make sure I am wrong in some parts of my paper. I agreed with some of their comments (maybe about 20%) but the other 80% I don't think their comments are helpful. In fact, some of the comments show how naive he/she is in image processing (am I being over the top now? probably...but until you've seen this one particular comment then you understand me LOL!). Anyway, on the good side of his/her comments, he/she suggested me to do one thing which is to normalise my histograms. Initially I disagreed because histogram normalisation is implemented when we want to measure similarity between two histograms. But I persuaded my 'black heart' to just bloody do it and see how's the results. I took about 10 or 15 minutes to modify my algorithm and ran the program. After about 3 hours I got the results...ta..da...............surprisingly accuracy, sensitivity and specificity have increased 4% which makes my method produced almost 90% accuracy. But then it was only 4% and I'm still not sure how significant the increments are. But the main thing is..it is visually better to present 89% sensitivity instead of 85%.

After a long discussion with my supervisor we agreed that the reviewers did not read thoroughly my paper. They probably jumped from the first line to the third line and to the seventh line. If this is the way they did it then I would say I hope their papers will be rejected as well in other journals or conferences (wow...is this me? swearing LOL!). If my ICPR rejected paper is submitted to Portugal, my MIUA rejected paper will be submitted to Ireland. Well..well...well....what do you know? there might be reasons behind of double rejection? God knows! In a couple of weeks time I will be going to London. I hope that I can present my ICCCV paper fluently and I hope London brings some luck to me :-)......Summer is around the corner and I can wait to wear my shorts and t-shirts again. Phewwww.....I am tired I need a break either in June or July.

Taking My Deep Breaths

Holla la...it's me again the Dr.Jungle boy who is always dreaming and chasing his dreams. Every day he tries his best to make one of his dreams comes one step closer. Anyway...that's not what I want to talk about in this post. The thing is that I want to talk about what I have been doing in the last two months since my last update. If you followed my previous post about how disappointed I was with the rejection of my paper, finally I managed to get over of it. Really? Yeah after several weeks. In fact, I now can say there is a reason why my paper was rejected. I took about 3 solid weeks to do further investigation about the rejected paper or method. I lots of modification not only the paper but the algorithm. In terms of line of code, it was previously less than 100 but after huge changes it's now 400. That's a lot! I mean for s single algorithm in a single conference paper. When when it comes to writing or explaining the method in the paper, I was struggling to make it 8 pages. Initially I made 10 pages and till several revisions, I managed to make it 9 pages. I sent it to my supervisor and very pleased because he took only several days to review it. He got back to me with some very useful feedback and finally I managed to make it 8 pages. I submitted the paper into ICIAR conference which will be held in Portugal. This time I am very positive with my method and I really hope the paper will be reviewed by the right people and hopefully will get accepted.

The most challenging part is developing my other method while my heart is still bleeding. I mean it was in March when I was aiming to submit a paper into MIUA conference which will be held in London. The main reasons why I wanted to submit a paper into this conference is this conference is a medical based one which means all presenters will be most likely come from medical imaging people. It will be very good because in general in every presentation you have general idea of what they will be talking about. In many conferences, most of them are generic and most probably you will end up attending a presentation which are not within your research interests. Second reason is, my supervisor is one of the steering committees of this conference. So I would like to support this conference (by submitting a paper into it). Anyway...I got the new of my paper rejection when I was developing this MIUA method (and writing the paper) and I was shattered and feel like I wanted to cry. Really? was it that bad? Yeah It was really that bad because I really wanted to attend ICPR conference and wanted to see Sweden of course. Another thing is, it's a huge conference and will be attended by hundreds of different people from all over the world. In networking point of view, this is a golden opportunity of course and making new friends! But hey! I missed it but I have already promised to myself to submit a new paper to this conference again. I will make sure to give my best shot this time! Somehow I managed to survive from March and April. It was horrible months and experience of course (not much in April but March). I do hope May will be a better month for me and June will be much nicer.

After I submitted my MIUA and ICIAR paper, it was the journal. It was a difficult one because I had to write about 17 pages (maximum 20 pages). It was a long paper and the longest paper ever I have written. I submitted it to the co-authors and got feedback from them. Very useful comments actually. After several weeks of hurdles I finally submitted my journal and I hope God would give me some good results in the next a few months. Waiting the decision results of your conference/journal papers are worse than waiting your exam results. Because in many exams you actually know how well you did during the exams but it is very different in writing paper. You are basically proposing something you think which is right and of course there is no definite answer for that. But different reviewers have different opinions about what you think right. In their views it could be completely crap or something unacceptable at all. So it is actually very difficult to justify the criteria of an accepted paper. In many cases (which I believe many research students have done in the past) you will try to follow a general set of rules of a 'good paper'. For example, precise writing, flawless errors grammatically, using graphics to explain complicated subjects, all sections are connected each other, convincing results, experiment of a massive data, etc. Well, you name it!!!! I bet many PhD students have done this before but I'm telling you that those criteria are very subjective. Again I'm saying this..different reviewers have different opinions about it.

Right! Enough about it...because I really don't want to talk about it anymore. In the last four months I have written one journal three conference papers and I am now really tired mentally. I am now taking deep breaths and just enjoying my badminton sessions. This May I want to enjoy the month and free pressure from doing any sort of experiments. However, I am at the moment developing a new method again. Yeah a new method believe it or not. This idea came when I was reading about local binary pattern. So this new method will be based on the idea of local binary pattern. But this is not a local binary pattern based method. This is different of course! I used similarity measure metrics to measure if an unknown sample is malignant or normal based on the model constructed in the previous phase. Ha! that's sound so brilliant now LOL! But I'm taking this very slowly..I have about 30 days to do this before June. In June I am planning to combine all of my methods and hopefully will get good results. Okay folks my coffee has gone cold..now I need to make a new one and enjoy it :-)

P/s: Feeling blessed cuz I have this precious time to update my blog :-)