Are you nervous about your ICIP ‘25 conference presentation? Do you want to improve the content, structure, or visuals for your talk? Or are you just looking for tips to better deliver your presentation?

Effective public speaking is a critical skill for engineers and researchers, yet many struggle with communicating complex ideas to diverse audiences, and academic conferences are particularly challenging environments to learn how to give presentations. This free conference workshop is designed to help you feel more confident about your upcoming presentation, by applying key communication principles to its design and delivery. In this workshop, Prof. Alan Chong (University of Toronto and the Immediate Past President of the IEEE Professional Communication Society), will lead you through several key strategies for making your ICIP ‘25 presentation (and all future oral presentations) more clear, memorable, and engaging.

We will:

1. Introduce elements that will help effectively frame your content, starting by developing an understanding of the audience’s needs, creating and reinforcing a simple core message, and adding intentional structural cues throughout the talk to help your listeners focus throughout the talk.
2. Apply several simple but powerful concepts for refining your visuals to help them reinforce your talk’s key messages.
3. Work on your vocal and physical delivery, building an awareness of the key metrics for success and identifying important strategies to help build your confidence in your presentation content, and public speaking in general.

Bring your slides, your notes, and your willingness to participate in an active workshop that will allow you to immediately apply simple yet important communication principles to your upcoming conference presentation and develop skills key to your professional development.

Alan Chong
Director, Engineering Communications Program; Associate Director, ISTEP

Bio: Alan Chong is an Associate Professor, Teaching, the Associate Director, Undergraduate, in the Institute for Studies in Transdisciplinary Engineering Education and Practice (ISTEP), and the Director of the Engineering Communication Program at the University of Toronto (UofT).  He has over 25 years of teaching experience at UofT, where he focuses on integrating communication instruction into engineering and design courses. Viewing communication as a discipline-specific and lifelong learning process rather than an isolated skill, he fosters students’ abilities across multiple modes of discourse, including writing, reading, speaking, and visual communication. He is also the Immediate Past President of the IEEE Professional Communication Society (ProComm), where he has worked on creating opportunities for members of other IEEE societies to receive discipline specific communication training.