Michael Black
Information Systems Manager
Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology
103 Kroeber Hall, #3712
University of California
Berkeley CA
94720-3712
USA
http://hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu
Michael Black is the manager of Information Systems at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley. Michael is an anthropologist by training, specializing in paleoanthropology, osteology, and functional morphology, but informatics and knowledge systems have played an increasingly large role in his research and professional life.
Michael has worked in anthropology and related fields since 1986. He has conducted archaeological and paleontological fieldwork in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, as well as supervising lab work involving specimen curation, photography, and casting & molding. He has undertaken metric and statistical analyses of specimens curated in museums around the world, and he has taught both graduate- and undergraduate-level university courses, and given science outreach talks to K–12 students. Through this experience, he has gained first-hand knowledge of the specific needs of the various audiences that contribute to or benefit from anthropological research.
His interests include database systems, knowledge organization systems, and expanding knowledge integration, both to support academic research and facilitate public access to knowledge. Michael holds a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology and Anatomy from Duke University.
Michael will present The Delphi toolkit: Enabling Semantic Search for Museum Collections. [Paper]
