failure

Year in review: 2015 – postdoc year 1

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It seems to be a tradition already for me to write my “year in review” posts a year or more after the reviewed year (see the reviews of my first, second, third and fourth years as a PhD student). Today, although 2016 is drawing to a close, I will be reviewing the year 2015, or my first year as a postdoc.

PhD student to postdoc

In January 2015 I started my postdoc at the Biomedical Imaging Group Rotterdam at the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands. I already knew the group a little bit, and the location was close to where I lived, so it did not feel like a major transition. I also was continuing a project related to my PhD, and my PhD defense was still six months away. So at first, being a postdoc was not all that different from being a PhD student.

What was different, is the fact that I was on a two year contract. I was aware I would need to find my own funding. Besides travel grants, I haven’t obtained any funding (in the Netherlands, PhD positions are fully-funded 4-year contracts), so I wanted to learn more about this. Luckily, my supervisor asked me to help out a colleague from a different department, who was applying for an internal 1-year grant. Unfortunately the grant wasn’t funded, but it gave me useful insights into the grant writing process.

Independence?

Although at the start of 2015 things didn’t feel very different, there were two events in 2015 that made me feel more independent (or perhaps, more like a real grown up).

In March, I moved to Rotterdam, into an apartment which I bought all by myself. By that I mean that I was the only owner, I of course needed to get a mortgage. But the fact that I was “allowed to” buy an apartment, and that a financial institution trusted me with a mortgage, felt pretty awesome.

In June, I defended my PhD thesis! The defense day was amazing and I’m thankful to everybody who joined that day. I first gave a short presentation, featuring my cat Buffy:

After this, I was joined by the committee and answered questions for an hour, which is a tradition in the Netherlands. The first question was actually about cats! Answering it helped me find my confidence and the rest of the hour went well too. After a short deliberation of the committee, I got my diploma and became a Dr!

Grants

While 2013 was a year of writing papers and 2014 a year of revising them, 2015 definitely became a year of writing grants.

In August, I applied for the first “big” grant I applied for as the main applicant. The grant was called “Open Mind” and called for original ideas. I spent a lot of time brainstorming, and made it to the finals. I did not get the grant, but the idea really felt mine, and formed the basis for several other proposals I would write later.

After this, I felt that I might really have a shot at getting my own funding eventually. So I applied for the internal 1-year grant, and for a tenure track fellowship at Delft University of Technology. These were both rejected, and Delft even managed to reject me twice.

Now that I think about it, perhaps applying for all these grants, even without getting them, also contributed to me feeling like a “real researcher”.

What about papers?

In the middle of all the grant writing, I did work a bit on the project I was hired for, although not as much as I should have. From the start I wanted to work on two applications. I submitted a paper on the first application only 2 months into my postdoc, but it was rejected at MICCAI, then rejected at a MICCAI workshop, and then finally accepted at ISBI.

The paper on the second application faced a lot of delays, the first being my attempt to implement a part of the method by myself, rather than use an existing implementation. So, in 2015 I didn’t have anything to submit yet.

There were also good news regarding papers. When my thesis was approved, three papers in it were under review, and these were all accepted before my defense. One of these was a MICCAI paper, which I presented (as a poster) in October in Munich, Germany. I also had a workshop paper on a PhD-related topic accepted, and presented it in Copenhagen, Denmark just a week later.

What else?

There are a few other things on my 2015 list that don’t fit into the categories above. I gave talks about my research and about my career, organized a workshop at ICML, joined the board of the Dutch society of pattern recognition and reviewed a lot papers.

I also went on vacation, which I’ve been doing throughout my PhD as well. According to my 2015 overview, I was away from the office for 4 weeks. Of these, I spent 2 weeks working from time to time (but never full days), and 2 weeks 100% in vacation mode.

Take-aways

I did a lot of things, but too little research. I didn’t follow the 20/80 rule. In other words, I didn’t concentrate on the 20% of tasks, that will bring me 80% of the results in the future: writing papers. But the other 80% were useful in other ways, like contributing to my feeling of independence, so I don’t really have regrets. The three pieces of advice I can extract from this year are:

  • Don’t do too many projects at the same time
  • Fail as fast as possible
  • All (even “unproductive”) experiences are useful

CV of Failure: Things I didn’t dare to try

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Image by https://unsplash.com/@tersh4u

What counts as failure?

A recent #withAPhD conversation on Twitter prompted me to write a bit more about my CV of failures.

So far, I have been tracking the “quantifiable” failures, such as paper or grant rejections in my CV of failures, or shadow CV. However, there are a lot of other things that contribute to my experience of failure (and learning to deal with it) which are more difficult to quantify – because I have not tried them at all.

Most of these things can be summarized with the words “impostor syndrome.” I was convinced I would fail, or perhaps even worse, I was convinced “they” would laugh at me for even trying. But time and time again, evidence showed that I probably did have a chance. And even if I had failed, “they” would have thought it was good that I tried. It probably would have been better than always regretting not trying in the first place. So, what do I regret that I didn’t try?

Things I didn’t try

Although originally I thought only about purely academic things, I realized this pattern of not trying goes back much further. A few examples:

  • Talent show in high school. I’ve played piano for 7 years, but don’t consider it “talent show” quality, so I don’t sign up. At the talent show, somebody else is playing piano, but with many hiccups along the way.
  • First year of computer science at university. The student organization has sign up lists for different committees. The committee to organize parties seems fun, but I’m afraid it will have too many people, and I won’t be chosen, so I don’t sign up. Later I become friends with several guys who did join the committee, and realize they would have loved to have me.
  • Internships during my BSc and MSc. Several people are going abroad for internships. I’m afraid to get delayed with getting my diplomas. The projects I do in the Netherlands are all great and I get my diplomas on time, but the gap between the international experience I have, and the international experience that I could have, starts widening.
  • I’m writing papers during my PhD. The most competitive conferences such as NIPS seem to be way out of my league. I submit to good, but less competitive conferences and workshops. My first three papers all get accepted and I have a great time at the conferences. Later, I get evaluated on the quality of my publications – the places I’ve published do not really “count”. I read more papers from NIPS, and realize that maybe, I could have published there, too.
  • I’m finishing my PhD, and read all the regulations for graduating. A part of the regulations describe the requirements for cum laude. This involves a recommendation from the PhD advisors and several external reviewers. I ponder about asking my advisors, but decide against it. After all, even a graduate from our department who wrote several highly cited papers, didn’t graduate cum laude. “They” would find it ridiculous that I even brought the subject up. My defense is a success and the committee members are very positive. Later I confess to one of my advisors about my doubts, and he reassures me it would have made sense to at least try.

I learn from these events by recognizing the patterns and doing things differently the next time around. I did go on to participate in many committees, and even lead the student organization. The internship abroad was possible during my PhD. Although I still haven’t tried submitting to NIPS, I am now getting rejected often (and occasionally accepted) at MICCAI. I approach senior academics and ask for recommendations for fellowships and jobs. I am still scared every time, but past experiences tell me that it’s really much better if I try, than if I don’t.

Or, to quote Susan Jeffers*,

You’re not a failure if you don’t make it. You’re a success because you tried.

* Author of Feel the Fear… and Do it Anyway. The title alone is great advice.

CV of Failure: introduction

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Image by https://unsplash.com/@tersh4u

My CV of Failure

Here it is – my CV of failure, or “shadow CV”.

I first found out about the concept of a CV of failure from this article. After a professor from Princeton posted his CV of failures online, shadow CVs have been getting more attention on Twitter, under the hashtags #ShadowCV and #CVofFailures. And it’s getting very popular too – the same professor now added a “meta-failure” of his shadow CV getting more attention than his research.

I already wrote about various successes and disappointments during my PhD (during my 3rd and 4th years). To write those posts, I used an Excel sheet that I normally use for yearly evaluations. Here is a screenshot from my 3rd year as a PhD student:

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The one thing you can probably guess is that green is something that was successful, and red is something that was not. Creating a shadow CV would be essentially compiling all the red parts, over the five years that I’ve been doing research. In the era of tracking everything from what you ate to what music you listened to, why not track failures as well?

The experience

Given that I already had all the data, compiling the CV was quite easy. It was exciting – I was curious whether my shadow CV would be longer than a professor’s. It was comforting – the list wasn’t too long after all, and the inevitability of the list expanding in the near future didn’t seem as daunting. I also realized that it was good to start failing early with travel scholarships, because I feel more prepared now for the larger failures that I encounter.

But most importantly, compiling the CV was motivating. I thought about whether anything would have been different for me if I had seen such CVs a couple of years ago. As many other PhD students, I was not very confident. There were many things I didn’t even dare to apply for. Sometimes senior researchers would tell me these thoughts are unfounded, that I should just apply, and that everybody gets rejected. Sometimes I listened, and sometimes got rejected, but sometimes got accepted, which ultimately gave me more confidence. I hope that seeing shadow CVs can help other students do the same: go for more opportunities, fail, and learn from it.

Year in review: final year as a PhD student

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This post is a summary of 2014, the last year of my PhD. I am writing it a whole year later due to my difficult relationship with blogging. There are two reasons for this: a recent conversation about blogging on Twitter, with this result, and the fact that the summary of my third PhD year played an important role in me deciding to resurrect this blog.

As 2013 was a year of submitting papers, I expected that 2014 would be a year of paper resubmissions. That guess was quite accurate. But 2014 had more challenges in store for me. The year didn’t start out great for me for personal reasons. I am not sure I will ever discuss the details online, so let’s just leave it at “life changing event”. Up until that point, I was sure I would finish my PhD on time. But, with so many things changing so rapidly, I started having serious doubts about my progress.

Writing and staying motivated

Despite the personal chaos, I continued to work on the revisions of my rejected papers. In February, I resubmitted Paper 1. That was tough, so I didn’t want to touch the other rejected papers for a while. Besides, I had other activities lined up, such as a research visit to Copenhagen, where I wrote a conference paper about the work I had done the year before. The visit was a great experience, both professionally and personally! Unfortunately, I received a rejection, adding yet another thing to the revise-resubmit list. On top of that, I was rejected for the Anita Borg scholarship for the third and final time. But there was also a bright side: for example, around the same time I gave my first invited talks, which was a much-needed boost for my confidence.

In June, I finally received the coveted “We would be happy to publish your manuscript” email about Paper 1. This gave me the needed motivation to continue with the other revisions. In July, I resubmitted Paper 2, and in September, Paper 3, which by then had already been rejected at two different journals. Again, it was very helpful to be involved in other activities, such as organizing a workshop and teaching, to stay motivated.

With one accepted journal paper and two others under review, I again started hoping that I would submit my thesis by the end of the year. The thesis requires at least four chapters, each based on a “publishable” paper. My supervisors agreed, so I spent the last months working on Paper 4. Paper 4 described recent results, and was therefore very refreshing in the midst of all the revising. I finished it on time and submitted it to a conference in December. And then, with three papers “in limbo”, both 2014 and my PhD contract, ended.

Take-aways

My year of revisions had a few successes and several disappointments. However, the more important successes were the things that these experiences taught me. I…

  • …became a seasoned reviser-and-resubmitter
  • …learnt how to stay confident as a researcher despite a lot of disappointments
  • …realized even more deeply how important it is to have colleagues who believe in you, who support you, and who are up for a grabbing a beer (or a Spa rood), whether it is to celebrate or offer a shoulder to cry on.

Year in review: third year as a PhD student

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As I mentioned before, it’s important to keep track of your successes and disapointments. Since I do have a list of sorts, I decided to share my summary of 2013 here.

Writing

2013 was definitely a year of journal papers. Or at least, of long overdue journal paper submissions. Here are the totals! I submitted four times in total (one paper twice, and two papers once). Two of these were rejections, one “revise and resubmit” and one still under review. So, 2014 probably will be a year of journal paper resubmissions.

Reviewing

Next to paper writing, there was also paper reviewing. In the beginning of last year, I was getting worried that I was not invited for reviews, but this worry turned out to be unfounded. I guess this goes together with submitting journal papers (and getting into the system) and meeting more people, who have more reviews than you, but are also more busy. I want to believe in review-karma: by writing good reviews, I hope to get good reviews. By good, I mean objective and constructive, not necessarily an “accept”.

Funding

2013 was also a year in which I tried to apply for scholarships to finance my conference visits and the trip to Tuebingen. For the second time (the first time being in 2012), I did not get the Anita Borg scholarship. I did get the ACM-W / Microsoft Research grant to go to a conference in China, which was awesome! The application that I spent quite a lot of time on, for the short-term fellowship from EMBO to go to Tuebingen, unfortunately got rejected (after I returned from Tuebingen already). However, I was able to get some financial support through my university, which was not a competitive application, but very helpful.

Research visit

And of course, 2013 was the year I went on a research visit, for which I have not (yet?) been able to write an overview. In short, the three months went by really fast and I had a great time. What everybody says about research visits is true. It is really helpful to experience a different place and get an idea of how people do research there. I think it’s a must for all PhD students, especially from smaller labs. It probably doesn’t even need to be a lab in a different country to get an impression of “how things are done” and to pick up useful research skills. I already have my next short visit planned, what about you? Did you / will you do a research visit during your PhD?

Year in review: second year as a PhD student

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This post originally appeared on my previous blog.

After my one-year evaluation, the first thing I did was sign up for a course on presentation skills. To be honest, I hesitated a bit at first, but I started hearing quite a few good things about Art of Presenting Science, so I decided to see for myself what that was all about. I really, really loved it! I can’t really summarize my experiences in a few sentences, so perhaps I will dedicate a whole post to this.  I tried to put a few of the things I learned to the test when presenting my work at the meeting of the NVPHBV (Dutch Society for Pattern Recognition and Image Processing), and at the Benelearn conference in Gent, Belgium.

As for research, I was pursuing several directions that are relevant to Multiple Instance Learning, learning with dissimilarities, or both.  A few of these ideas resulted in submissions to conferences, while others were abandoned after a while. Perhaps “abandoned” is not the correct word to describe the situation, and “on the shelf” would be better.  The ideas are still very interesting, but at the time I did not have enough insight to turn them into something that could be published. I hope that I will have more luck with this in 2013 🙂

In the summer it was time to take a break from my own research, and learn a lot about what others are doing at the Machine Learning Summer School in Santa Cruz, California in the US. The summer school consisted of two weeks of lectures from people from academia and from industry. The proximity to Silicon Valley ensured a lot of interesting talks by Google, Facebook and other companies that have a lot of data and therefore do a lot of machine learning. Next to all the talks, it was a great experience to meet other researchers from all of the world and compare notes on everything from doing a PhD to making tacos. I hope we will meet again!

mlss

As if that wasn’t enough traveling, I received the decisions on two papers that were submitted a few months ago. Both were accepted as poster presentations: “Does one rotten apple spoil the whole barrel” at the International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), and “Class-Dependent Bag Dissimilarities for Multiple Instance Learning” at the Structural, Syntactic and Statistical Pattern Recognition (S+SSPR) workshop.  S+SSPR was held in Hiroshima, and ICPR was held in Tsukuba, close to Tokyo. With an extra day to recover from jetlag and a few days (because three weeks in the US aren’t cheap) for sightseeing, this meant a two-week trip to Japan. One of my posters in action:

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I enjoyed both conferences although they were completely different from each other. S+SSPR was very small, which allowed informal discussions more often and attending a lot of the talks. I also noticed the same type of close community (but with a different subset of researchers) that I saw at Multiple Classifier Systems a year earlier. ICPR was very big, which was a new experience for me. The program booklet was as large as the proceedings of some conferences! Therefore it was quite difficult to choose which talks to attend. I found out that often, my first impression (such as “this is relevant to my research” or “I won’t understand this at all”) was wrong.  In fact, I was pleasantly surprised by a few talks about unrelated topics, but given by a great presenter. There is still a lot to learn for me there.

Although I thought I could deal with time differences pretty well, I did have a few sleepless nights in Japan. On one of these nights, I had an idea about the relationship of my own work to a quite successful MIL classifier. Who wouldn’t get inspired if you are surrounded by wonderful things like this:

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Instead of scribbling the idea down with a few words, arrows etc, which is what I usually do, I actually started writing the paper. I didn’t get very far while I was in Japan, but I did discuss the idea and let it develop. After the decision to made to submit a paper to Multiple Classifier Systems 2013 (I admit, I loved MCS 2011 so much I just couldn’t resist), the whole process of writing and submitting the paper cost me about a month. Perhaps that might be long for some people, but for me it was definitely a record. I’m also very happy with the process, so perhaps I will try this more often (starting to write a paper as soon as the idea is there).

 

Year in review: first year as a PhD student and before

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This post was originally appeared on my previous blog.

Before I write an overview of 2012, I thought it would be nice to write about some highlights of the previous year.

I graduated in November 2010 with a thesis titled “Random Subspace Method for One-Class Classifiers“. This is me with my diploma:

imgp0905

After going on vacation and celebrating the start of 2011, my first official working day was on the 3rd of January 2011. Now my job was to work on a different pattern recognition topic: Dissimilarity-based Multiple Instance Learning. 

However, for a while I still continued working on my MSc subject in order to write a paper for Multiple Classifier Systems 2011. The paper “Pruned Random Subspace Method for One-Class Classifiers” (as you can guess, the regular method was not good enough) was accepted for presentation!

In June we went to Naples, Italy for the MCS 2011 conference. Here is an impression of me presenting:

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Here is an impression of the conference lunch:

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Besides the great food, wine and weather I really really enjoyed the conference. I finally got to meet the people behind all the papers I have been citing and I got a feel for the type of community that all these people formed. After the conference, we had a few days to see more of Naples, the Vesuvius volcano and the ruins of Pompei.

As my next project, I helped with a journal paper that a colleague of mine was writing, “Bridging Feature and Structure Representations in Graph Matching”. Without getting into too many details, we wanted to classify objects that are represented as attributed graphs, while varying the importance of the attributes (features) or the actual graph structure. We investigated two ways to do this: using a graph edit distance and using graph kernels, which was my part. Besides learning a lot about graph kernels, I really enjoyed this project because of the regular meetings and discussions and my responsibility to the other people involved.

In September, it was time to go to Italy again, now for the Similarity-based Pattern Recognition Workshop (SIMBAD) 2011 in Venice. My supervisor presented the paper “Bag Dissimilarities for Multiple Instance Learning”, which is also what most of my current work is about. Unfortunately, I was very ill during the conference, so I didn’t have such a good conference and sightseeing experience as in Naples.

Next to research, some of my time was spent on education. I followed courses on topics related to image processing and bioinformatics, and also did the online Machine Learning course, which was very helpful. I also got to experience education from a different side a little bit while assisting in Pattern Recognition courses for PhD students and for people from industry.

In the end of the year, I had my go/no-go presentation and I received a go, together with a lot of helpful advice on how to improve my work. The main points were to become more comfortable with mathematics, be more precise in why I’m pursuing a certain direction in research, and to improve my presentation skills.

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