Anthony C. Robinson is Associate Professor of Geography and Director of Online Geospatial Education Programs at Penn State. Online geospatial education programs under Robinson's leadership include Penn State's GIS Certificate, Master of GIS, and Master of Spatial Data Science programs operated in collaboration with the John A. Dutton e-Education Institute. He is also the Faculty Director for the GeoGraphics Lab in the Department of Geography.
Robsinson currently serves as co-chair of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) Commission on Visual Analytics, and recently served as President of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS).
Robinson's research focuses broadly on designing and evaluating geovisualization tools to improve geographic information utility and usability. He has focused this work in epidemiology, crisis management, national security, and higher education domains. His research efforts have involved characterizing how users assemble and collect their analytical results, studying the use of visualization tools using eye-tracking, and exploring issues related to map symbol standardization in the context of emergency management. In recent work, Robinson has focused on characterizing the design of viral maps in social media and on designing approaches to visualize the presence of absence in big spatial data.
Robinson teaches one of Penn State’s Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)—Maps and the Geospatial Revolution—which has drawn over 150,000 students from 200 countries since 2013.