There aren't "supposed" to be takeaways here, just sharing my personal experience. Nonetheless:
a) Rejections can sting at all stages of your career. I'm pretty used to it by now. And a single paper doesn't change my career. But I still took this one really hard. 20/n
ETHICS
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Career Rejection and Resilience in Academic Research
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Research Award Recognition and Shifting Career Priorities
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And two weeks ago, we were lucky to hear that we got a best papers award. Thank you reviewers, committee, track chair @marsdancer
! I was ecstatic, though as both my life and career priorities have shifted, it doesn't feel as significant to me as it once might have. 19/n -
ICML2024 Position Paper on Privacy in Machine Learning
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But then the #ICML2024 position paper track was fatefully announced in Jan 2024. This is *exactly* the community we wanted to reach (broad ML). They're specifically asking for position papers. They even had privacy in ML in their CfP! After revising, submitted again. 16/n
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Research Rejection and Career Anxiety in AI Academia
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Remember, I said this paper felt core to my research agenda. A blatant rejection caused me to (incorrectly) generalize the feeling that my entire research agenda was misguided. For reasons, I was pretty career anxious at that time, and truly distraught (ask my wife). 11/n
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Three Paper Rejections: A Crushing Academic Experience in AI Research
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Apparently, wrong: we got THREE of these. Clear reject, with high confidence. I couldn't bring myself to read the reviews for a week.I can't describe how crushing this rejection was. (Spring 2023) 10/n
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Peer Review Frustration: Vague Stylistic Critique in Major Revision
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This was *incredibly* frustrating. Usually major revisions feature specific and technical critiques. It was rejected for a vague and stylistic critique. This is the closest I've come to emailing a PC chair in frustration, but I held my tongue (it's not their fault). 7/n
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Academic Paper Rejection: Vague Revision Requests Frustrate Researchers
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We were given a major revision. Requested changes were vague: "tighten" the writing. Clarify differences with prior work. Make points clearer. I honestly thought it was fine before on all counts, but OK, we honestly tried more. Nope. Not good enough, reject. (late 2022) 6/n
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Public Data for Private ML: Differential Privacy Research Agenda
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Personally, I have been super interested in public data for private ML. I honestly think this is the future of DP deployments. So this paper felt *super* core to my entire research agenda: how exactly we think we, as a field, should push forward. 4/n
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Critical Position Paper Submitted to Topical Conference
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Florian had some convos with others on this topic, including Nicholas. We saw a topical conference with a call for position papers. We decided to write and submit a critical piece (self-critical of some of our previous works as well!) 3/n
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Privacy Challenges in Public Data for Machine Learning
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This work started through some conversations with Florian (Summer 2022). We noticed that while public data was *really* helpful in private ML, weird things happened. An arms race of larger "public" datasets. Evaluating on datasets that didn't have much to do with privacy. Etc 2/n