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About | BLOGS | Portfolio | Misc | Recommended | What's New | What's Hot

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Robert J. Robbins is a biologist, an educator, a science administrator, a publisher, an information technologist, and an IT leader and manager who specializes in advancing biomedical knowledge and supporting education through the application of information technology. More About:  RJR | OUR TEAM | OUR SERVICES | THIS WEBSITE



Presentations

Videos

Robbins' presentations that have been captured as videos are shown here.

2021: Cloud Computing and Grant-Funded Biomedical Research: Opportunities, Challenges, and Risks

Presentation by R J Robbins at AIRI Annual Meeting, 13 Sep 2021. virtual meeting

Cloud computing has transformed the capability and agility with which businesses deploy information technology (IT). Cloud scalability and speed-to-delivery supports the spectacular increase in new products and services, delivered at a rate and volume which we now take for granted. And yet, grant-funded biomedical research has been slow to adopt the Cloud, even with current drivers like covid-19 as urgent motivators. The slow adoption of cloud-computing by grant-funded biomedical research institutions is not due to inertia, lack of resources, inadequate technical expertise, or other rate-limiting skill or resource factors. Instead, there is a profound mismatch between the typical commercial use of cloud services (to operate 24/7 production software in a revenue center) and computing in support of research (running batch-job programs in a budget-constrained cost center), that it is difficult to run scalable cloud services in support of research. Some of the cloud-computing advantages so obvious in the for-profit sector do not apply in a grant-funded research environment. Further, the defining characteristic of cloud computing — dynamic scalability with an unlimited pay-as-you-go pricing model — is particularly dangerous in a grant-funded environment.

2018: Partly Cloudy: Migrating to a Cloud-Based IT Infrastructure in a Grant-Funded Research Environment: Challenges and Limits

Welcoming Presentation by RJ Robbins at Partly Cloudy Conference, hosted by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA, 25 Oct 2018.

Cloud computing is coming, and coming fast. Some estimates show the market for cloud services growing at 25% per year. Cloud computing is perhaps the most fundamental and profound change yet to occur in IT. Compared with other endeavors, computing is still an incredibly immature activity, characterized by learn as you go methods — much as characterized the early days of medieval church architecture: that looks good; like the new dome; oops, it fell down; wonder why? Cloud computing represents a major maturational step for computing in general, abstracting away most of the lower layers from the necessary attention of users. It is the future of computing. And yet... And yet, will it, can it work in a biomedical research environment? Do the cloud-computing advantages that are so obvious in the for-profit sector apply as well (or work at all) in a grant-funded research environment? What are the attributes of the grant-funded research environment that raise issues, pose challenges, possibly create limits to the full deployment of cloud computing in that environment?

2013: Big Data: Yet Another Buzzword or Actual Big Deal?

Presentation by R J Robbins at BRIITE Annual Meeting, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, 11-13 Dec, 2013.

The invention of digital information storage technology is allowing the amount of stored information on Earth to grow at an incredible rate. In 1986, 99% of stored information was in analog form; today 99.9% is digital. When n is approaching all, that is, when it is possible to access data on all relevant subjects, analyses change in both quantitative and qualitative ways. If "de-identified" data sets can be joined with other data sets, de-identification becomes impossible.

Slide Sets from Invited Talks

These are slide sets that were used during specific talks. The slides are as they were presented and no effort is made to update their content. There is a fair amount of redundancy in the content of the different presentations, as many deal with similar problems, presented for different audiences.

2018: Partly Cloudy: Migrating to a Cloud-Based IT Infrastructure in a Grant-Funded Research Environment: Challenges and Limits

Welcoming Presentation. Partly Cloudy Conference, hosted by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA, 25 Oct 2018.

Cloud computing is coming, and coming fast. Some estimates show the market for cloud services growing at 25% per year. Cloud computing is perhaps the most fundamental and profound change yet to occur in IT. Compared with other endeavors, computing is still an incredibly immature activity, characterized by learn as you go methods — much as characterized the early days of medieval church architecture: that looks good; like the new dome; oops, it fell down; wonder why? Cloud computing represents a major maturational step for computing in general, abstracting away most of the lower layers from the necessary attention of users. It is the future of computing. And yet... And yet, will it, can it work in a biomedical research environment? Do the cloud-computing advantages that are so obvious in the for-profit sector apply as well (or work at all) in a grant-funded research environment? What are the attributes of the grant-funded research environment that raise issues, pose challenges, possibly create limits to the full deployment of cloud computing in that environment?

2016: Adding Sidenotes to a PDF File

Technical Briefing Presentation. Board Meeting, Genetics Society of America, Seattle, WA, 2016.

2016: Reconceiving Biodiversity: Implications from (Meta)Genomics

Invited talk: Ottawa, Canada, 1 Jun 2016.

2014: Genomics and Metagenomics: What is the Role of the Darwin Core?

TDWG 2014 Annual Conference, Elmia Congress Centre, Jönköping, Sweden, Oct 27-31 2014.

2013: Big Data: Yet Another Buzzword or Actual Big Deal?

BRIITE Semi-annual Meeting, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, 11-13 Dec 2013.

2012: How Diverse is the Biosphere?

TDWG 2012 Annual Conference, People's Palace, Beijing, China, 22-26 Oct 2012.

2012: Data Management for LTER@100

2012 LTER All Scientists Meeting, Estes Park, CO, 10-13 Sep 2012.

2012: Aligning Expectations with Resources: What's the Trick

BRIITE Semi-annual Meeting, St Jude Children's Research Hospital Memphis, TN, 5-7 Sep 2012.

2012: Half of Our Biosphere is Missing

Keynote Presentation, Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference 2012. Copenhagen, Denmark, 2-4 Jul 2012.

2012: Biodiversity Working Group Report

Genomic Standards Consortium, Annual Meeting, Shenzhen, China, 5-7 Mar 2012.

2011: Biodiversity Working Group Report

Genomic Standards Consortium, Annual Meeting, Bremen, Germany, 28-30 Sep 2011.

2011: IT Architecture: Mastering Complexity With Design

BRIITE Semi-annual Meeting, St Jude Children's Research Hospital Memphis, TN, 7-9 Sep 2011.

2008: Data Centers Get Serious: Unlimited Demand Meets Practical Reality

BRIITE Semi-annual Meeting, St Jude Children's Research Hospital Memphis, TN, 10-12 Sep 2008.

2007: Implementing Security without Inhibiting Research: Mission Impossible

BRIITE Semi-annual Meeting, University of California @ San Francisco, Mission Bay Campus San Francisco, CA, 3-5 Oct 2007.

2006: Sharing Digital Biological Data: Historical Successes and Continuing Challenges

MGED9 Meeting, Seattle, WA, 6-7 Sep 2006.

2006: Research Computing Grows Up

BRIITE Semi-annual Meeting, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, New York, 3-5 May 2006.

2006: Data Sharing: Different Needs, Different Solutions

BRIITE Semi-annual Meeting, NIH, Natcher Conference Center, Bethesda, MD, 19-20 Apr 2006.

2005: Multi-Institution Collaborative Computing: What does it really take?

BRIITE Semi-annual Meeting, Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA, 2-4 Nov 2005.

2005: Data Management in the Research Laboratory: The Sine Qua Non of 21st-Century Science

Invited Talk, Mayo Clinic, 2005.

2005: IT operations: Making IT Work in a Profoundly Heterogeneous Environment

BRIITE Semi-annual Meeting, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, 27-29 Apr 2005.

2005: GLAAAS: Global Authentication, Authorization, and Auditing System Logical Requirements for Access Control in a Totally Federated Environment

Educause CAMP Med Workshop: Identity and Access Management for Medical Applications, Baltimore, Maryland, 9-11 Feb 2005.

2005: The Future of BioDiversity Informatics What's Possible, What's Not

GBIF Workshop: Building species banks: How shall we shape the future? University of Amsetrdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2-4 Mar 2005.

2004: Strategic Planning for IT Support of Grant-funded Research, II: Where are we now and where should we be going?

BRIITE Semi-annual Meeting, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA, 22-24 Sep 2004.

(582,046 bytes; 121 slides)

2004: Information Technology and 21stCentury Biology: Bioinformatics and Beyond

Invited Talk, Professional Development Day, Bellevue Community College, Bellevue, WA, 5 Nov 2004.

(582,046 bytes; 121 slides)

2004: Object Identity and Life Science Research

W3C Workshop on Semantic Web for Life Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts USA, 27-28 Oct 2004.

(582,046 bytes; 121 slides)

2003: Institutional Standards: The Critical Missing Piece

NIST Workshop: Information Science Standards to Enable Biomedical Research Bethsda, MD, 4-5 Nov, 2003.

2003: IT Support for Grant Funded Research: Strategic Issues

BRIITE Semi-annual Meeting, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA, 10-12 Sep 2003.

2003: Digital Publishing Support

BRIITE Semi-annual Meeting, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA, 10-12 Sep 2003.

2001: Bioinformatics and the New Information Technologies

The Canadian Biodiversity Network Conference, Ottawa, Ontario, 1-4 Mar 2001

2000: Leadership by Example: Biomedical and Genome Informatics

AAAS annual Meeting, Washington, DC, 17-22 Feb 2000.

(481,690 bytes; 98 slides)

1998: Economic Impact of Bioinformatics

ATCC Bioinformatics Symposium, Bethesda, Maryland, 6 Nov 1998.

(3,072,440 bytes; 120 slides)

1998: Information, Logistics, and 21st Century Research

Cancer Centers Administrators Forum, Portland, Oregon, 12 Oct 1998.

(2,323,492 bytes; 139 slides)

1998: Information Technology: The Foundation for 21st Century Research

Keynote Address, Self Graduate Fellowship Retreat, Kansas City, Missouri, 16-18 Aug 1998.

(723,821 bytes; 138 slides)

1998: What is Biological Informatics?

Keynote Address, Australian National Academy of Sciences Conference on Biological Informatics, Canberra, Australia, 6-8 Jul 1998.

(1,392,640 bytes; 96 slides)

1997: Next Steps for Working Scientists: Access to Data

CODATA Conference on Scientific and Technical Data Exchange and Integration, Bethesda, Maryland, 15-17 Dec 1997.

(532,262 bytes; 104 slides)

1997: 21st Century Biology: Informatics in the Post-Genome Era.

The Pfizer Inc.- Olga G. Nalbandov / Beckman Institute Symposium on Bioinformatics, Structure, and Function, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 29 May - 1 Jun 1997.

(1,831,070 bytes; 128 slides)

1996: Information Management: The Key to the Human Genome Project

Current Topics in Health Science Librarianship, Johns Hopkins University, 27 Jun 1996.

(907,560 bytes; 122 slides)

1996: New Technologies for Research Administration

Breifing Presentation, given to science research administrators and intended to explain the (then) new WWW and how it might affect research administration.

1995: Genome Informatics, the Sine Qua Non of Genomic Research

Fourth International Conference on Bioinformatics & Genome Research, San Francisco, California, 5-7 Jun 1995,

(69,777 bytes; 16 pages)

1994: Computer Applications in Biology: New Tools, New Insights, New Science

Special Seminar: Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, 15 Apr 1994.

(1,779,851 bytes; 68 transparencies - 8.5 x 11 format)

1994: Information Infrastructure for Biology: Electronic Publishing on the Global Information Highway

Special Seminar: School of Library and Information Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1 Nov 1994.

(1,779,851 bytes; 36 pages)

1994: Federal Support for Bio-Informatics

Briefing Presentation. Board of Directors, National Center for Genome Resources, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 10 Oct 1994.

1994: Computing the Genome: Efforts to Reverse Engineer Humans

Invited Talk: David D. Lattanze Center, Baltimore, MD, 7 Apr 1994.

1994: Comparative Genomics: A New Integrative Biology

Invited Talk: Workshop on Integrative Approaches to Molecular Biology, Cuernavaca, Mexico, 20-24 Feb 1994.

RJR Experience and Expertise

Researcher

Robbins holds BS, MS, and PhD degrees in the life sciences. He served as a tenured faculty member in the Zoology and Biological Science departments at Michigan State University. He is currently exploring the intersection between genomics, microbial ecology, and biodiversity — an area that promises to transform our understanding of the biosphere.

Educator

Robbins has extensive experience in college-level education: At MSU he taught introductory biology, genetics, and population genetics. At JHU, he was an instructor for a special course on biological database design. At FHCRC, he team-taught a graduate-level course on the history of genetics. At Bellevue College he taught medical informatics.

Administrator

Robbins has been involved in science administration at both the federal and the institutional levels. At NSF he was a program officer for database activities in the life sciences, at DOE he was a program officer for information infrastructure in the human genome project. At the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, he served as a vice president for fifteen years.

Technologist

Robbins has been involved with information technology since writing his first Fortran program as a college student. At NSF he was the first program officer for database activities in the life sciences. At JHU he held an appointment in the CS department and served as director of the informatics core for the Genome Data Base. At the FHCRC he was VP for Information Technology.

Publisher

While still at Michigan State, Robbins started his first publishing venture, founding a small company that addressed the short-run publishing needs of instructors in very large undergraduate classes. For more than 20 years, Robbins has been operating The Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project, a web site dedicated to the digital publishing of critical works in science, especially classical genetics.

Speaker

Robbins is well-known for his speaking abilities and is often called upon to provide keynote or plenary addresses at international meetings. For example, in July, 2012, he gave a well-received keynote address at the Global Biodiversity Informatics Congress, sponsored by GBIF and held in Copenhagen. The slides from that talk can be seen HERE.

Facilitator

Robbins is a skilled meeting facilitator. He prefers a participatory approach, with part of the meeting involving dynamic breakout groups, created by the participants in real time: (1) individuals propose breakout groups; (2) everyone signs up for one (or more) groups; (3) the groups with the most interested parties then meet, with reports from each group presented and discussed in a subsequent plenary session.

Designer

Robbins has been engaged with photography and design since the 1960s, when he worked for a professional photography laboratory. He now prefers digital photography and tools for their precision and reproducibility. He designed his first web site more than 20 years ago and he personally designed and implemented this web site. He engages in graphic design as a hobby.

963 Red Tail Lane
Bellingham, WA 98226

206-300-3443

E-mail: RJR8222@gmail.com

Collection of publications by R J Robbins

Reprints and preprints of publications, slide presentations, instructional materials, and data compilations written or prepared by Robert Robbins. Most papers deal with computational biology, genome informatics, using information technology to support biomedical research, and related matters.

Research Gate page for R J Robbins

ResearchGate is a social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. According to a study by Nature and an article in Times Higher Education , it is the largest academic social network in terms of active users.

Curriculum Vitae for R J Robbins

short personal version

Curriculum Vitae for R J Robbins

long standard version

RJR Picks from Around the Web (updated 11 MAY 2018 )