🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️

𝐆𝐞𝐭 𝐚 𝐩𝐞𝐞𝐤 𝐛𝐞𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐬𝐮𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐚𝐜𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐚!!! 👀📚

The concept of success rates (and by extension, rejection rates) is something that comes up a lot in research and academia. 🎓

Grant schemes and publication venues have typical success rates that you can easily find online, but these numbers can obscure how success rates can play out at an individual level. 📉📈

Likewise, social media is disproportionately filled with tales of success, as well as epic stories of people succeeding after unusually long streaks of rejection. 🌟💔

And other activities, like landing tech jobs 🖥️👔, or collaborating with industry 🏭🤝, don’t always have clear success rate statistics associated with them. 📊❓

Today’s video is an attempt to address that – I go through the approximate (estimated) success rates I’ve had in my career in publishing, grant funding, collaboration and job opportunity endeavours. 🎥🔍

I also recount some particular anecdotes:

💠 a number of schemes where I still (yay) have a zero percent success rate (even now as a well established academic),

💠 a horrendous ICRA2015 where we got 1 out of 7 (14%!!!) of papers accepted,

💠 a paper (SeqSLAM) that was utterly slammed by the computer vision community that, unchanged: won the ICRA best vision paper award; RSS best paper finalist; & has over 1000 citations 🚫🏆, &

💠 that rare, rare situation where you submit a proposal that you are 100% happy with. 🎉

I’d never claim that these numbers are “typical” – I’ve worked hard, but much of this is luck, having good people around you, survivorship bias, and the privilege of having the opportunity in the first place.

Nevertheless, with appropriate context, I think there is value to a) talking about them b) showing the huge variation in numbers even well into your career c) and showing the value of persistence (sometimes) if you’re in a situation to keep trying. 💬📊✨

And finally a note about rejection: some people have a tendency to mythologize repeated rejection and eventual success: the challenging reality is, of course, that repeated rejection isn’t always abuse – sometimes there’s valuable signal in it: experience, and the advice of experienced others, is how you help differentiate between the two situations. 🧭👥.

There are lots of ways you can be successful, contribute, and leave an impact – sometimes rejection is a useful data point in determining what is best for you, rather than a challenge to overcome at all costs. 🌟🔍💡

Academia #SuccessRates #ResearchLife #AcademicChallenges #Persistence #Publishing #GrantFunding #CareerDevelopment #AcademicJourney #SocialMediaReality

Full Video Notes

All right, it’s Friday here in Brisbane, and I thought I’d have a little bit of fun with a video that’s a little different from normal. This topic has come up quite a bit informally in conversations, especially in my mentoring sessions with mentees and other discussions. Today, I want to talk about the success rates of various things I’ve applied for and done throughout my career to date. I’ll share some numbers and a couple of anecdotes about particularly good or bad experiences with applications and submissions.

This video doesn’t have any particular agenda other than to familiarize those who’ve been asking with what the numbers are actually like. It’s definitely not intended to be one of those humblebrag videos, though some parts might come across that way. Nor is it one of those “endless rejection culminating in final success” stories. My aim is simply to present data from my career—sometimes covering up to 20 years—and see whether it’s helpful or interesting to some of my viewers. All right, let’s get started.

Publishing: Success and Challenges

The first category I want to discuss is publishing—my experiences submitting and publishing papers. The activities I’ll talk about today range from solo efforts, like fellowships, to being part of large teams where my role was relatively small. I’ll try to highlight these differences where relevant, but the video covers a wide variety of involvement.

Nature and Science Papers

As a young PhD student and postdoc, I was captivated by the idea of publishing in Nature or Science. While the merits and shortcomings of these prestige journals are debated, it has always been a dream of mine. I haven’t submitted many papers to these journals, and as of now, my success rate is 0% from a very small number of attempts.

I have, however, submitted to some partner journals. For example, I published a commentary in Nature Machine Intelligence. One memorable rejection came from Science Robotics. We submitted a pre-submission inquiry, got the green light, worked hard on the paper, submitted it, and were desk-rejected in just 19 hours. While I haven’t been successful with these top-tier journals, the experiences have been valuable nonetheless.

Top Computer Vision Conferences

The research I do spans robotics, positioning, navigation, and mapping, often intersecting with machine learning and computer vision. Conferences like CVPR are incredibly competitive—CVPR, for instance, is ranked as one of the top venues in all fields of English-language research based on raw citation metrics.

Over the years, we’ve submitted a moderate number of papers to these conferences. Our acceptance rate is generally in line with the average, which is around 20–35% for the most competitive conferences. One of our proudest successes was a visual place recognition paper led by my colleague Toby Fiser, accepted at CVPR.

The review process, however, can be brutal. For example, in 2011, my Sequence SLAM paper was rejected from ICCV with scathing reviews, only to later win Best Vision Paper at ICRA 2012 and receive over a thousand citations. This taught me that review systems can be highly volatile, and persistence often pays off.

Robotics Conferences

Robotics conferences like ICRA and IROS are our bread-and-butter venues. Over the past 20 years, we’ve submitted several hundred papers to these conferences. They use a one-step review process, meaning you get reviews and then a decision, without a rejoinder or rebuttal.

Our overall acceptance rate is around 40%, but the process remains noisy. For instance, in 2015, we submitted seven papers to ICRA and only had one accepted—a brutal experience that required a lot of student support to recover from. On the flip side, there have been years when almost all of our papers were accepted. It’s very much a case of swings and roundabouts.

Robotics Journal Papers

For more mature research, we publish in robotics journals. Recently, the introduction of Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL) has provided a fantastic short-form option, bridging the gap between conference papers and long-form journal articles.

Out of 55 papers submitted to RAL, we’ve had a 56% acceptance rate. I particularly appreciate RAL’s review process because, compared to conferences, it feels less volatile. Truly compelling work has a higher chance of eventually getting published.

Grants and Funding Applications

Defense Research Schemes

Despite being an established researcher, I’ve had a 0% success rate in defense-related grant applications. While the proposals seemed solid, and similar organizations have invited me to speak, these particular schemes remain elusive. This demonstrates that even experienced researchers face significant hurdles.

ARC Discovery Projects

The ARC Discovery Project is Australia’s standard three-year federal research grant. My success rate here is around 25%, which aligns with the scheme’s average. These grants have ranged from sole investigator projects to collaborative ones. However, the review process can be inconsistent, with mixed feedback on team composition.

ARC Fellowships

I’ve had better success with fellowships, with a 60% success rate across five applications. Highlights include securing a DECRA and a mid-career Future Fellowship. Fellowships are one of the few application types where I’ve consistently felt fully satisfied with my submissions.

Tech Grants and Fellowships

Grants from tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon are highly competitive but immensely valuable. For instance, I received a Microsoft Research Fellowship early in my career, which provided $100,000 USD and incredible flexibility. These grants are often unrestricted gifts, making them versatile and long-lasting sources of funding.

Reflections on Careers and Resilience

Finally, I want to touch on career planning and resilience. Success rates vary widely, and rejection is an inevitable part of an academic career. Some colleagues experience years of unbroken success, only to face crushing rejections later. Others endure long streaks of rejections before finally breaking through.

Your ability to handle rejection depends on factors like your career stage, responsibilities, and privilege. I’m fortunate to be in a privileged position, which makes navigating these ups and downs easier. Reflecting on your strategy and risk tolerance is crucial for long-term success.

I hope this video demystifies some aspects of being a moderately successful academic. It was fun to shoot, and I hope you found it interesting. See you next time!