Hanan Samet is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is a member of the Computer Vision Laboratory of the Center for Automation Research and also has an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. At the Computer Vision Laboratory he leads a number of research projects on the use of hierarchical data structures for geographic information systems. His research group has developed the QUILT system which is a GIS based on hierarchical spatial data structures such as quadtrees and octree, and the SAND system which integrates spatial and non-spatial data. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1975. During that time he was a Research Assistant at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project. His doctoral dissertation dealt with proving the correctness of translations of LISP programs. Between 1978 and 1980 he was also affiliated with the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California where he worked on an extension of this research. He spent part of 1982 at the National University of Singapore, and part of 1989 at the Basic Research Laboratory of NTT in Tokyo, Japan. In 1992 he was a visiting professor at the University of Pavia in Italy. He has consulted for a number of industrial and government organizations and has conducted numerous short courses and seminars on geographic information systems, spatial data structures, LISP, and artificial intelligence.

He has written over 125 technical publications on the subjects of hierarchical spatial data structures, geographic information systems, image processing, computer graphics, programming languages, artificial intelligence, robotics, and data base management systems. He is considered as an authority on the use and design of hierarchical spatial data structures such as the quadtree for geographic information systems, image processing, and computer graphics. He is an Area Editor of "Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing: Graphical Models and Image Processing". He is on the Editorial Board of "Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing: Image Understanding", "Journal of Visual Languages", "Pattern Recognition", "GeoInformatica", and "Transactions on GIS". He is the author of the two books "The 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 a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and the IAPR (International Association of Pattern Recognition).