David Bell graduated in 1969 in Pure Mathematics, and has three research degrees in Computing topics. He became a full professor 1986 - at Queen's University, Belfast since 2002, where he was the Director of Research in Knowledge and Data Engineering, a group focussing on research in Soft Computing until 2011, and he is now Professor Emeritus.

He has produced several hundred publications, and supervised about 40 PhDs to completion. He was prime investigator on many national projects and on many EU-funded projects (eg MAP, ESPRIT, DELTA, COST, AIM,.) in IT in the Eighties and Nineties.

His activities have included: PC chairmanships (eg joint Programme Committee Chair of VLDB'93 and ICDE'97), conference PC memberships and journal editing/ editorial board memberships -eg- Computer Journal and North-Holland's Information Systems. He has been guest editor/co-editor of well-known journals such as IEEE Trans KDE, on (eg) Knowledge Discovery, Data Driven Data Mining and Semantic Web. He is Author/Co-author of several books, including Distributed Database Systems published by Addison-Wesley in 1992. He served on the UK Technology Foresight Panel for several years, and was member of a number of national and international advisory and funding groups, including, for example, a sub-group of the Wellcome Trust in the UK

His research interests are centred on data and knowledge management - the linking of reasoning under uncertainty, machine learning, and other artificial intelligence techniques with database work . This involves the exploration of other topics in computing, including, aspects of agent awareness and innateness.