Hanan Samet is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park and is a member of the Institute for Computer Studies. He is also a member of the Computer Vision Laboratory at the Center for Automation Research where he leads a number of research projects on the use of hierarchical data structures for database applications, geographic information systems, computer graphics, computer vision, image processing, games, robotics, and search.
He received the B.S. degree in engineering from UCLA, and the M.S. Degree in operations research and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Stanford University. His doctoral dissertation dealt with proving the correctness of translations of LISP programs which was the first work in translation validation and the related concept of proof-carrying code.
He is the author of the recent book “Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures” (pdf) published by Morgan-Kaufmann, an imprint of Elsevier, in 2006, 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 “Design and Analysis of Spatial Data Structures,” and “Applications of Spatial Data Structures: Computer Graphics, Image Processing, and GIS,” both published by Addison-Wesley in 1990.
He is the Founding Editor-In-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems (TSAS), the founding chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL, a recipient of the 2009 UCGIS Research Award, 2011 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, and a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, AAAS, IAPR (International Association for Pattern Recognition), and UCGIS. He received best paper awards in the 2007 Computers & Graphics Journal, the 2008 ACM SIGMOD and SIGSPATIAL Conferences, the 2012 SIGSPATIAL MobiGIS Workshop, and the 2013 SIGSPATIAL GIR Workshop.
2014 Wallace McDowell Award
“For fundamental contributions to the development of multidimensional spatial data structures and indexing, translation validation, and proof-carrying code.” Learn more about the Wallace McDowell Award
