Hanan Samet is a Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park  and is a member of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He is also a member of the Computer Vision Laboratory at the Center for Automation Research.

He leads a number of research projects on the use of hierarchical data structures for database applications involving multimedia data such as spatial and image databases. Samet's research group has developed the SAND spatial browser, the VASCO system of JAVA applets for visualizing and animating spatial indexes, and the MARCO system for map retrieval by content, which enables pictorial queries on a symbolic image database system. Current research prototypes include the STEWARD system for identifying the geographic focus of documents thereby facilitating the performance of spatio-textual search to enable searches that rank the results by spatial proximity rather than by exact match, the NewsStand (see the CACM October 2014 cover issue with an accompanying video), and the TwitterStand system that apply these ideas to a database of news articles and Tweets, respectively, that enable them to be accessed using a map query interface.

He is the author of "Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures" (Morgan-Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA, 2006), which received an Honorable Mention Award (one of two with one first place winner) in the 2006 best book in Computer and Information Science competition from the Professional and Scholarly Publishers (PSP) Group of the American Publishers Association (AAP). Samet is also the author of "Design and Analysis of Spatial Data Structures" and "Applications of Spatial Data Structures: Computer Graphics, Image Processing and GIS" (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1990), which are the first two books on spatial data structures.

He is the Founding Editor-In-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems (TSAS) and was the founding chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL.  He is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, AAAS, IAPR (International Association for Pattern Recognition), and UCGIS (University Consortium for Geographic Science). He was elected to the ACM Council as the Capitol Region Representative for the term 1989-1991, and is an ACM Distinguished Speaker.

He is a recipient of a Science Foundation of Ireland (SFI) Walton Visitor Award at the Centre for Geocomputation at the National University of Ireland at Maynooth (NUIM), 2009 UCGIS Research Award, 2010 CMPS Board of Visitors Award at the University of Maryland, 2011 ACM Paris Kanellakis  Theory and Practice Award, 2014 IEEE Computer Society Wallace McDowell Award.  He received best paper awards in the 2007 Computers & Graphics Journal, the 2008 ACM SIGMOD and SIGSPATIAL ACMGIS Conferences, the 2012 SIGSPATIAL MobiGIS Workshop, and the 2013 SIGSPATIAL GIR Workshop, as well as a best demo award at the 2011 SIGSPATIAL ACMGIS'11 Conference.  His paper at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) was selected as one of the best papers for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

In his pioneering research since the 1980s on quadtrees and other data structures, as well as his well-received books, Samet has profoundly influenced the theory and application of multidimensional spatial data structures. His contributions to, and application of, incremental nearest neighbor search, metric navigation of spatial structures, and spatial data mining exemplify the breadth of his work, the impact of which can be seen in a wide array of practical applications.

In addition to this body of work, his 1975 doctoral thesis on formal proofs of correctness of compilers, and the symbolic execution of compiled execution sequences, was among the earliest contributions to the field that twenty years later became known as translation validation for compilers.

He has a doctorate from Stanford University.