Hart studied at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, leading to a B.E.E degree.He did his graduate studies at Stanford University where he got his M.S. and Ph.D.

While at the SRI 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. He also contributed to the development of Shakey the Robot.

Hart and Richard O. Duda are the authors of "Pattern Classification and Scene Analysis", originally published in 1973. This classic text is a widely cited reference, and the first edition was in print for over 25 years until being superseded by the second edition in 2000.

A strong advocate of artificial intelligence in industry, Hart was the founding director of theFairchild/Schlumberger Artificial Intelligence Center and co-founder of Syntelligence, Inc., acompany specializing in expert systems for financial risk analysis.

Hart is currently Group Senior Vice President at the Ricoh Company, Ltd. This is notable since very few Westerners serve as executive officers in major Japanese corporations.