He made significant contributions in the field of computer science in a series of widely cited publications from the years 1967 to 1975 while associated with the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International, a laboratory where he also served as director.

He did his graduate studies at Stanford University, where he got his MS (1963) and PhD (1966);[3] Thomas M. Cover was his advisor and discovered[4] & co-published a seminal paper on 1-NN nearest neighbor search.

[5] While at the SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center, Hart co-authored 20 papers, among them the initial exposition of the A* search algorithm and the variant of the Hough transform now widely used in computer vision for finding straight line segments in images.

[6] Hart and Richard O. Duda are the authors of "Pattern Classification and Scene Analysis", originally published in 1973.

[6] A strong advocate of artificial intelligence in industry, Hart was the founding director of the Fairchild/Schlumberger Artificial Intelligence Center and co-founder of Syntelligence, a company specializing in expert systems for financial risk analysis.