2009 UCGIS Research Award

Hanan Samet

Hana SametThe University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) is pleased to announce that Professor Hanan Samet, a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, is the recipient of the 2009 UCGIS Research Award.

The UCGIS Research Award is given annually to the originator(s) of a particularly outstanding research contribution to geographic information science (GIScience). The main criterion for choosing the awardee is the impact of the research on the theory and/or practice of GIScience, or on research using GIS, or on geographic information technology. Each year nominations are taken from any of the 80+ UCGIS institutional members. A committee of well-recognized UCGIS scholars, representing many GIScience disciplines and including past awardees, evaluates the nominations.

Hanan Samet is recognized for his landmark book, Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures (2006, Morgan-Kaufmann), a 1000+-page, single-authored tour de force demonstrating his outstanding research on the theory and practice of GIScience. This book was also an award winner in the “Best Book in Computer and Information Science” competition of the Professional and Scholarly Publishers (PSP) Group of the American Publishers Association (AAP). His contributions in designing and using hierarchical spatial data structures for GIS, such as the quadtree and octree, have had a tremendous impact on GIScience research and software development. In addition, many of his other algorithms are now actively used in map and image processing, computer graphics, spatial and non-spatial databases, in both raster and vector form, in real-time, in web-based systems, and for a host of applications from medical to legal to digital government. His hundreds of publications also include two seminal books on spatial data structures, both published by Addison-Wesley in 1990: Design and Analysis of Spatial Data Structures, and Applications of Spatial Data Structures: Computer Graphics, Image Processing, and GIS.

Hanan received his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1975, leading to subsequent research in data structures, computer graphics, computer vision, robotics, programming languages, artificial intelligence, database management systems, and GIS. At the University of Maryland he is also affiliated with the university’s Computer Vision Laboratory of the Center for Automation Research, and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He leads a number of research projects on the use of hierarchical data structures for GIS, including QUILT (a GIS based on hierarchical spatial data structures), SAND (which integrates spatial and non-spatial data), the SAND graphical user interface for browsing spatial databases, VASCO (a series of spatial data structure applets), and a symbolic image database system.

Hanan is co-founder and chairman of the SIGSPATIAL special interest group within the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), and has served as the co-general chair of the 2007 and 2008 ACM SIGSPATIAL Conferences on Geographic Information Systems (ACM GIS). He is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and IAPR (International Association for Pattern Recognition), and has received best paper awards at the 2008 SIGMOD Conference, the 2008 SIGSPATIAL Conference, and from the journal  Computers & Graphics. Hanan is currently on a prestigious Walton Fellowship at the National Centre for Geocomputation at the National University of Ireland Maynooth.

Please join us in offering our congratulations to Hanan for his original and long-standing contributions to the field of GIScience. By combining innovative and productive intellectual contributions that have impacted the theory and practice of GIScience, and by simultaneously providing a major contribution to the algorithms employed by the software industry, Hanan’s contributions are decidedly of the import and quality that this award was designed to honor.

Many thanks also to the 2009 award sub-committee which consisted of Dr. Mike Worboys as chair (Spatial Information Engineering, U. of Maine and 2008 recipient), with Drs. Barbara Buttenfield (Geography, U. of Colorado-Boulder), Marguerite Madden (Center for Remote Sensing and Mapping Science, U. of Georgia), Harvey Miller (Geography, U. of Utah), and Gerard Rushton (Geography, U. of Iowa). The award committee was organized by UCGIS Research Chair Dawn Wright of Oregon State University.

UCGIS congratulates Hanan Samet!

Past Recipients of the UCGIS Research Award:

2008 - Mike Worboys, U. of Maine – object-oriented modeling
2007 - Ron Eastman, Clark – IDRISI GIS and image processing software
2006 - Frederico Fonseca, Penn State – ontologies for GIS
2005 - Mei-Po Kwan, Ohio State – space-time algorithms and visualizations
2004 - David Mark, SUNY-Buffalo – cognitive and linguistic aspects of spatial relations
2003 - Max Egenhofer, U. of Maine – mathematical theories underpinning GIScience
2002 - Reginald Golledge, UCSB – AAG presidential address on nature of geographic knowledge