Journal shankar2k's Journal: Stupid Academia 3
I just found out that the paper I submitted to CVPR was rejected. I am so pissed. This isn't the first time a paper of mine was rejected. At least before, I *knew* that the paper I wrote was pretty bad.
But this time, we put a lot of effort into this paper. We carefully thought about all of the objections people might have and we tried to answer them preemptively. We ran a lot of experiments, included a lot of different applications and pretty pictures.
Let me explain how the conference paper cycle works. You submit a paper to a conference, and then two monthes later you get three reviews. Each review has a grade (ranging from "Definitely Reject" to "Definitely Accept), and a series of comments and concerns. You submit a rebuttal for each of the comments and concerns, and then the area chair for your paper's subject decides if they should let your paper in.
We got one "Definitely Accept", one "Probably Accept" and one "Borderline Accept", so the reviews were all over the place. We answered each comment thoroughly and carefully. But it didn't matter. The area chair's comments ended up being even more harsh than the reviewers' comments. In summary the area chairs basically said "your whole method is whack". B*tches.
My whole life I've liked math and science better than the humanities because questions tend to have unambiguous answers. If you've proved something is true, and your proof is correct, than nobody can say anything. But in research, we're out here at the bleeding edge, and especially in Artificial Intelligence, there are a bunch of camps that all want to assert that there method is the One True Way, and that everyone else are bunch of hacks. As you can see, conference papers aren't about science, but politics.
This is the main reason that I'm not going into academia when I graduate. I think I can muster up enough gumption to assert that my ideas are good enough to get a PhD, but I don't want to play these kinds of political games all of my life. Screw that.
There is a silver lining. First of all, it's highly likely that my professor is even more pissed than I am. We'll probably resubmit the paper to another (better) conference. Also, another paper of ours, where I was the second author, was accepted to CVPR. That paper had much more modest results, and I guess we managed to not step on anyones' toes. So in June I'll be heading out to San Diego for this thing. Goddamn F*cktards.
Update: Oh yeah, on another completely unrelated note, my niece Srinija was admitted to Illinois for the Fall. I'm so happy for her!
Illinois (Score:2)
Re:Illinois (Score:1)
Re:Illinois (Score:2)