Hanan Samet is at the University of Maryland where he is a member of the Computer Vision Laboratory and leads a number of research projects on the use of hierarchical data structures for database applications involving spatial data. His research group has developed the QUILT system which is a GIS based on hierarchical spatial data structures such as quadtrees and octrees, the SAND system which integrates spatial and non-spatial data and provides a spatial browser to visualize the underlying data, the VASCO system of JAVA applets for visualizing and animating spatial constructs and operations on the world wide web (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/quadtree/index.html), and the MARCO system for map retrieval by content which consists of a sophisticated pictorial query specification method and a symbolic image database system.

He has a Ph.D from Stanford University. He is the author of the recent book "Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures" published by Morgan-Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA, in 2006 (http://www.mkp.com/multidimensional), an award winner in the 2006 best book in Computer and Information Science competition of the Professional and Scholarly Publishers (PSP) Group of the American Publishers Association (AAP), and of the first two books on spatial data structures titled "Design and Analysis of Spatial Data Structures" and "Applications of Spatial Data Structures: Computer Graphics, Image Processing and GIS" published by Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1990. He is the founding chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL, and is the recipient of the 2009 UCGIS Research Award.