I am deeply honored and grateful to have received the ACM-W Scholarship, which enabled me to attend ICASSP 2026 in Barcelona. As this was my very first academic conference and featured my first published paper, the experience was truly a monumental milestone in my research journey.

During the conference, I had the incredible opportunity to present our work, “Sounding Highlights: Dual-Pathway Audio Encoders for Audio-Visual Video Highlight Detection,” in person. I received thoughtful questions and valuable feedback from researchers who stopped by, which significantly broadened my perspective on audio-visual learning and multimodal signal processing. It was incredibly rewarding to connect with people who share a passion for multimodal learning and video understanding.

Beyond my own presentation, attending ICASSP was an amazing experience overall. Walking around the poster halls felt like being a sponge, constantly absorbing novel ideas and state-of-the-art approaches from the global community. The sheer amount of knowledge transferred in such a short time span was incredible. Having conversations with researchers from around the world made me reflect on my own path and gave me fresh motivation to keep pushing forward in my academic career.

I am deeply grateful to the ACM-W Scholarship for providing me with this life-changing opportunity to share my research on an international stage and connect with such an amazing network of scholars.