Hanan Samet honored in the March 2013 issue of CACM

Hanan Samet, of UMIACS and Computer Science, was honored in the March 2013 issue of Communications of the ACM (CACM) with a tribute recognizing several of his important contributions to the field of spatial information.

The tribute, titled "Hanan Samet: A Trailblazer in Spatial Databases", highlights the pioneering work Dr. Samet has been doing on spatial information for the past 36 years. He co-authored the first paper on spatial data mining in the 1990 PODS Conference. His recent paper, “Duking it out at the smartphone Mobile App Mapping API Corral: Apple, Google, and the Competition,” won a best paper award at the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Mobile Geographic information systems (MobiGIS 2012). He was also honored with the 2011 Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for his research on quadtrees and other multidimensional spatial data structures for sorting spatial information.

Dr. Samet is regarded as the world’s leading authority on spatial databases and multidimensional data structures, and leading vendors such as Google and Microsoft use his results in their GIS and commercial mapping systems.