Squeezing My Brain Before a Short Holiday

Hollaaa...back again in my little blog trying to make sure my blog is not too empty or at least something is happening :-) The moment I'm writing this post I am waiting my desktop to produce experiment results. I ran it yesterday and decided to play badminton hoped that it will just do its work and will email me the results when I got back home. Unfortunately, when reading the 357th data, something went wrong. As a result, It stopped working and produced an error which needed to be fixed. When I finished badminton and got home, I checked my email and didn't get a report from my algorithm. Then I thought there must be an error somewhere while reading one of the data. This morning, when I got the office and check MatLab, yeah I was spot on! So I had to fix a few parts of the algorithm to make it working again. But this time instead of reading it from the first data I started reading the data where it stopped  before. But I have to save all the results from 1st data till 356th data. I have about 450 data all together and I just copy and paste all of them and analyse the results combination.

This is my desk in the office..writing this post while waiting my algorithm to complete its job

Anyway, It will be very busy week in the next three weeks. I have to prepare my journey to Ireland for another conference. I am looking forward to see the place. I got the feeling that it will be fairly similar with England? Wales or Scotland? Mmmm...I'm not sure but my gut is telling me these places will be very similar. That is why I am so looking forward to see Italy instead of Ireland. Well, it would another holiday for me (if you call it a short holiday) and the most important thing is to meet up with another PhD students and hopefully will make some friends :-) . But before that, I have to do a short talk to the Department's workshop on the 20th of  August and that is in a few weeks time (less than two weeks actually). I need to arrange my flights and also hotel. Just after my conference I will be heading back to London as my friend nick is coming for a visit in the UK. I will update soon regarding to our preliminary plan on Nick's visit :-). Yeah all the way from North Borneo and I am excited to visit Paris, Belgium and Holland (of course England, Wales and Scotland as well). One of the most exciting and fun thing to do is camping (hopefully we can do this) as well as climbing mountains :-). But at the moment I have a task which I need to do by next Friday (next week) and have to report my Professor about the initial outcomes. Fingers crossed I will get some good results. But it will be very very busy...it's Saturday today and I am in the office on my own working on it and need to implement a couple of experiments.....Till now see ya....I got the results already...looks better than my latest method? Mmmmm...I will update soon...

Accepted for Ireland and Italy!!

Hello All...after several weeks I have been silent from my blog here I am updating my blog again. Updating my blog is a pleasure for me because since I started my PhD I have been so busy and didn't have much time to update it. In fact, at one point of my PhD I almost forgot the fact that I have a blog. I have put so much effort into my PhD in the last 2 years 1 month of my PhD and I hope I can finish my study in 3 years. It's not because I don't enjoy what I'm doing but I really think it's time for me to get a job and start to think about my future especially the financial side of my life. If my parents were rich then I wouldn't mind to have another two years of my PhD by concentrating more on journal publications...

After a double rejections in my previous post, I almost  lost my motivation to do my research. In fact, I thought I must be really stupid because my two papers got rejected at the international conferences. Even more hurtful when you got some stupid comments or unhelpful feedback from the reviewers make you think weather they read your paper carefully or just simply scan your paper. But for more than two years, my experience writing paper is you will definitely get stupid comments from reviewers. Maybe this is one of the main reasons why it is important to submit into very high ranking conferences. But then the acceptance rate will be very low and if your papers keep rejected by them it can be very demotivated. As a result you feel like you don't really want to do your research and eventually lose your interest. Nah..this is very dangerous..if you loosing your interest then your performance will be slowing down and at one point if you are not resistant enough  you will stop and most probably end up with MPhil or you don't even get it. That's why all of my conference papers I submitted into average conferences (acceptance rate between 40% to 60%). High ranking conferences' acceptance rates are ranging between 10% to 30%. I just wish I had the time to do more investigation of my research so I could have better publications. I'm still aiming to submit paper into MICCAI and Medical Image Analysis journal which are the top publications in medical imaging.

Anyway...after almost a month rewriting my papers and submitted them into two conferences in Ireland and Italy, finally they got accepted. I am very happy indeed because I've invested so much time into one of the two my papers. When I got the first notification email from the conference organiser saying that my paper got accepted for an oral presentation I was over the moon and felt like.."yeah I did it and I know I can do it..". Perhaps two weeks after that I got another notification email from a conference in Italy saying that my paper got accepted for an oral presentation. It was a fantastic news of course. One more time I thought "yeah I did it again! oh yeahhhh..now i'm going to Italy". Yeah I am very happy because I'm going to Milan in Italy. I really hope that I have the chance to see Venice because people said this is probably the best spot to see the beauty of Italy. I can't wait to try their food of course especially their spaghetti!! Yesterday I have just completed final version of the papers and the conference registrations (for both of them). Today I spent most of my time surveying hotels and flight tickets to Ireland and Italy. I found a few but haven't booked yet. I should do it very soon to get the best deal even though the department will pay it. The thing is I always like to get better deals..I mean why should pay more if we can get a cheaper price?...ok..ok enough about that..it's the second day of eid mubarak (the muslim festival..not sure if I spelt it correctly) and I'm carving for all sort of different biscuits. For me..it is difficult to find pretty and delicious biscuits in the UK or at least this is true at where I live (Wales). They are plenty of puddings or cakes but not biscuits. Most of them are not hand made biscuits but machine made LOL!  They don't taste nice ..well some of them but most of them don't taste  good. I am at the moment missing Malaysian food so badly especially the food from Borneo. Really really badly...If I'm honest the food in the UK are ridiculously plain and almost tasteless..and boring because most of them were cooked in ovens or microwaved. Arghhhh..that's really bad..that's why most British don't know how to cook when it comes to using fire. I like cooking with fire but most people here are cooking with ovens or microwaves. For me that's not cooking but your just heating up your food to cook it. Cooking when there are several processes involved in it. not just simply take a chicken out from the fridge put some olive oil and black papers and put it into the oven and wait for 2 hours and...ta..da...it's cook. wow! that's magic! LOL! (this is not cooking)...

Enough about that because at the moment I am sleepy and lazy and not in a mood. Today is a bad day for me..I feel like I want to scream on top of my lung!! But I'm trying to calm down myself and nothing had happened. I think I better have a run and hopefully I feel better after :-)

PhD Conditional Offer in medical Imaging is received

This week I received a conditional offer from the University of Wales, Aber regarding to my PhD application which I submitted a week ago. Of course it does make me happy but I haven't heard anything about the scholarship. I assume the scholarship and PhD application are two different things. I hope to receive another good news in the coming weeks. I must say they did pretty quick decision about my application. I met Prof.Reyer when I gone back to London last Autumn and he said it won't take long for the department to make a decision.

For the past a few months, I have been doing quite a few reading about medical imaging especially the project that I'm going to do. I hope this new field for me gonna be something that I really enjoy. So far I enjoying reading most of the publications in medical imaging. As a student who comes from software engineering academic background, this new field would not stop me from learning.

PhD in medical Imaging

Hello to all my little ants again! He..he...

I'm back this morning with this thing which i wanted to tell you all. I have applied for a PhD course at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth! Now i am still waiting for reply from the admission office. I have received an email informing me that they have received my PhD application and now under consideration. I hope to get it as well as the scholarship being offered by the university.

The thing is I applied for my PhD in the field of medical imaging! Fuh!!!! but don't worry because i don't have to be a radiologist to be in this field. I don't have medical background and i don't have knowledge about prostate cancer. The research would be developing a software tool for prostate cancers detection.

When i was in the UK for more than 2 weeks composing my initial PhD proposal here are some of the things i did. 1st, I was busy like crazy squeezing my brain trying to understand many terminologies. 2nd, I was so much in preasure because i didn't understand lots of things. 3rd I was in pieces and trying to combine all those pieces with no guide at all.

But now i guess i am a little bit all right and managed to understand more and more!