Paper Rejection - academic character building

I just realised I have been back at Uni for just over a week now, which is awfully scary when considering just how much stuff has happened. One unfortunate event occurred last week when I was notified by the chair of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) that my paper I submitted back in September, has been rejected. If accepted, I would have been in Austria in May, for my 30th birthday, but unfortunately this is not to be. To put things in perspective (or, in other words, to make myself feel better), this conference only accepted 140 papers from over 900 submissions. My reviewers provided mostly possitive comments, but they also poo poo'd a couple things, some of which I agree with, but mostly I just think they missed the bloody point .... anyway ... it is a very exclusive conference, so it is no great shame to receive a rejection. Its all part of the publishing game.

As it turns out, this rejection may in fact be the best thing that could happen, because now I am re-writing the paper and preparing to send it to another conference, the "International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems" which will be held in Beijing, in October this year. Having never been to China (unless Hong Kong counts), I am far more excited about going to China than Europe. However, this conference is one of the top two robotics conferences in the world, so it is no shoe-in either, but it has to be said, the odds are far better than ECCV (around 40% acceptance for IROS, versus 20% for ECCV).

There is no doubt that the publishing game can be quite brutal, particularly when you consider how many good research papers are rejected by the relatively few top conferences and journals. However, thats the nature of the beast, and everyone knows it.