I am deeply honored to be selected as a fellow in APAN61 event in Dhaka, Bangladesh that allowed me to engage with the vibrant community. This experience was transformative, offering the exposure to new research technologies that broadened my horizons and deepened the meaningful connections with global experts and global community.

The Cross-Agency Information and Communication system developed by the team from NICT, Japan was outstanding and very much applicable in my professional field.  When communication outages during the disaster, resilient ICT system mounted on vehicles and drones moved autonomously to the disaster site and performed rapid information sharing with the onsite coordination office, thereby improving the efficiency of disaster response and rescue operations. Given my prior experience in wildfire monitoring using AI and UAVs in Nepal, the session on Monitoring and Detection of Wildland Fire Systems by Veerachai Tanpipat was both insightful and personally resonant. The works done regarding Wildland Fire Control and Management in countries like Thailand, Cambodia, Laos presented me the comprehensive understanding of Satellite data observation. The other valuable learning was about the Hazard Information Profile (HPI) from CODATA. It described various Meteorological and Hydrological hazards and metadata semantics types that simplified the understanding of disaster and illustrated the strategies and actions on risk reduction and management.

The AP-GAINED workshop by LEARN provided practical insights into the world of Generative AI and the prompt engineering for enhancing the professional efficiency. Equally inspiring was the session by Dr. Khondaker Abdulla Al-Mamun, who articulated the transformative role of AI in development and youth empowerment. It was inspiring to see the application of AI is real life problems and these innovations can bring meaningful improvements to the society.

I also got chance to get acquainted with cybersecurity expert Jamie Gillespie and attend his Security workshop. The session covered basic to advanced security analysis on Threat and countermeasures, Multi factor authentication, DDOS, DNS security and Email security. The collaborative discussion with other participants provided the deeper understanding of how cybersecurity issues pose challenge and how they are tackled in real-world scenarios. These key insights gathered are directly applicable in enhancing security practices in daily life.

The Cultural Show performance by the BdREN team was wonderful and being as part of it was really once a time moment. APAN61 Dhaka gave a truly enriching experience together with network of the wonderful people including Dr.Franz de Leon, Dr. Eric Ye, Biplab Chandra Mahanta, Muhammad Asif and the fellow participants. The knowledge shared during these sessions has broadened my knowledge expanded my network and, more importantly, has inspired me to contribute more actively to the Working Groups community and I look forward to applying these key learnings and continuing this collaborative journey.