The rejection page

In general, researchers a quite proud of their publication list. I suppose I am no exception. Yet, aside my publications, I have endured quite a lot of rejections. Some were fruitful, meaning that the comments I got from the reviewers allowed me to improve my article, while sometimes I got the feeling I was going completely misunderstood. Anyway, here is the (growing) list of conferences from where I have been rejected:

• STACS'94
• LATIN'94 (The same one rejected at STACS'94, grrr)
• CONCUR'94
• PPOPP'95 (The same one rejected at STACS'04 and LATIN'94, grrr)
• PACT'96
• RTSS'98
• ACC'99
• SAS'99 (The same one rejected at RTSS'98, grrr)
• FORTE'00 (The same one rejected at RTSS'98 and SAS'99, grrr)
• FTCS'00
• SRDS'00
• CDC'00 (Actually it was a whole session of 6 papers that was rejected)
• CASES'00
• IEEE TC, 2001 (We got two reviews for this article. The first review was for a different article, written by entirely different authors! The second review was also for a different article, but this one written by me with other colleagues, and on a distinct topic. We complained but the editor maintained his decision. Never in my life have I seen such an unfair review process.)
• IEEE TPDS, 2001
• DSN'01
• SRDS'01 (The same one rejected at DSN'01, grrr)
• DSN'02 (The same one rejected at DSN'01 and SRDS'01, grrr)
• EMSOFT'02 (Two submitted, one accepted)
• DSN'03 (Two submitted, one accepted)
• MFCS'03 (The same one rejected at DSN'03: at DSN they said the paper was too theoretical, while at MFCS they said it was too practical, grrr)
• TACAS'04
• ACSD'04 (One reviewer told us that our idea was really not new... and pointed us to a research report dating from December 2003, that is after our paper was submitted, grrr)
• SEFM'04 (One reviewer showed himself to be a complete ignorant of computer science by asking "what is worst case execution time (WCET) analysis?". This article was later published in FMICS'04)
• DSN'05 (Two papers rejected, grrr)
• SRDS'05 (The same one rejected at DSN'05, grrr)
• RTSS'05 (But with encouraging reviews; one reviewer asked what is ML!)
• SAC'06 (The same one rejected at RTSS'05, but this time the reviews were less encouraging, grrr)
• ESOP'06 (One reviewer said "Data flow, despite a lot of research efforts, has not been an overwhelming success, to say the least." Well, all Airbus planes are now programmed with the data flow language SCADE!)
• FASE'06 (The same one rejected at SAC'06 and RTSS'05, with still worse reviews, grrr)
• ICDCS'06 (An entirely re-worked version of the one rejected at SRDS'05 and DSN'05; the reviews noted that the paper had "some merrits", grrr)
• DSN'06 (Two papers rejected, grrr. One of them was published in 2009 in Formal Methods for System Design. No comment!)
• RTCSA'06 (The same one rejected at FASE'06, SAC'06 and RTSS'05, with both good and awful reviews; grrr. Anyway most of the reviewers missed the point that what made the paper original was the formal proof of the transformations for fault-tolerance. This paper was finally published in EMSOFT'06 and the extended version appeared in ACM Trans. on Embedded Computing Systems, 7(4), July 2008!)
• DSN'07 (Two papers rejected, grrr, but later published in 2009, respectively in IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing and Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. No comment!)
• EMSOFT'07
• PLDI'08 (The same one rejected at EMSOFT'07, finally published in LCTES'08)
• TACAS'09 (Later published in ACSD'09)
• DAC'09 (Two papers rejected, grrr. One of them was later published in JTRES'09, and the other one at DATE'10)
• EMSOFT'09 (grrr. Later published in MEMOCODE'10)
• DATE'10 (Two papers submitted, one accepted)
• DSN'10 (Our paper had a 3/3 technical soundness mark! But got rejected anyway, partly because it lacked experimental validation -- which was true but we provided the NP-completeness proofs, and partly because the reviewers thought that it was not suited to DSN -- grrr. Later published in ICPP'10.)
• EMSOFT'10 (grrr)
• PPoPP'11 (This was a disgrace: we got three reviews with very low confidence levels -- 2, 1, 2 -- and one reviewer claimed that PPoPP is not a good venue for a programming language paper. PPoPP stands for Principle and Practice of Parallel Programming and it is a SIGPLAN conference. We were really disappointed that the PC chair refused to ask for an additional review.)
• DATE'11 (Three papers submitted, one accepted)
• ESOP'11 (A fully revised version of the one rejected at PPoPP'11.)
• DAC'11 (Previously rejected at DATE'11. Strangely, even though the call for papers and the scopes of DATE and DAC are almost identical, we got completely different reviews, with conflicting criticisms. Two reviewers thought that our heuristics works on-line while the paper clearly says that it works off-line. Dumb reviewers.)
• FMSD (after a major revision, grrr).
• IEEE TPDS (after a major revision, grrr).
• TACAS'12.
• DAC'12.
• EMSOFT'12 (extended version of the one rejected at DAC'12).
• ASP-DAC'13.
• DAC'13 (two submitted, one accepted, better than nothing).
• EMSOFT'13 (two submitted, one accepted).
• DAC'14 (apparently close but still rejected).
• DSN'14 (a conference with a rebuttal that, once again, proved useless).