It is the fourth day of a nationwide lock down in the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic that the world is currently facing. I have been cooped up in my room for more than a week. My university closed down a couple of weeks before the prime minister’s call for a nationwide lock down that we are currently adhering to.
I have been working on an idea for several months. My objective is to develop an AI that can help augment a pathologist’s ability to diagnose a certain disease called the Celiac disease. I have hand annotated Histopathological images, yielding a novel data-set – rich in annotations that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. But with limited data, it is a herculean task to train a very deep convolutional neural network (with millions of learnable parameters) to make accurate predictions.
The AI must be able to propose a region of interest in a given histopathological image and indicate, with a certain degree of confidence that the doctors can perform diagnosis In the proposed region of the biopsy slide. In technical terms, the AI must perform a localization task on something I call the interpretable region. But so far, I have been unsuccessful (All my successes are statistically insignificant) in my attempts at beating the state-of-the-art numbers with the several experiments that I have been conducting. This account bears testimony to all my failures and the lessons that I elicited from them.
The very first lesson that I learned is that failures come as an altruistic experience. It is to personify the very idea of failure and remark its efforts in failing us as an act of altruism for our betterment. The only purpose that failure serves is that it makes an individual steadfast and rigorous in whatever field he has chosen for himself. It ensures to expertly, and surgically disentangle the childish romanticism of success from the more practical, tough and labyrinthine effort that begets success in reality. It titrates into our daily lives, the right amounts of passion and dispassion.
Particularly, I am talking about the repetitive nature of failures that young scientists like me have to inevitably face early on in our careers. These failures have an unfathomable quality about them. We acquire a taste for their bittersweet experience and before long, they become a part of our routine. Here, bitter is an encounter with failure itself and sweet is the insight into the scope for improvement that it brings along.
I think of it like acquiring a taste for tea. It takes people several cups of hibiscus tea before they genuinely relish the experience of drinking it. One might ask, as to why one chooses to partake in voluntarily downing multiple cups of this bitter beverage if neither its taste nor the flavor is appealing – to which I say, the persistence is in pursuit of beauty. The tea’s color, its staining on the porcelain, its acrid aroma and texture, these are beautiful things. One consumes this beauty when tea is consumed and to do so is a self-imposed privilege. Nothing furthers this truth for multiple failures on our way to success.
There is profound beauty in the directions that failures show us. If the winds had a paintbrush attached to their tails, the vibrant mess of brushstrokes it’d leave behind would expose this beauty. How many years go by, How many meaningless excursions in the empty expanses of the world do the winds take before momentarily filling a creature’s lungs with life!