Prof Bell graduated in 1969 in Pure Mathematics, and was later awarded several higher degrees in Computing. He has been a professor since 1986. He has about 300 publications, and has supervised about 30 PhDs and 3 MPhils to completion. He has been a prime investigator on many national projects and on many EU-funded projects (eg MAP, ESPRIT, DELTA, COST, AIM,…) in IT since 1981.

His research is in data and knowledge management - the linking of reasoning under uncertainty, machine learning, and other artificial intelligence techniques to more established database work - exploiting the close relationship between evidence and data. This involves the exploritation of other aspects of computing, including parallelism, data transmission, and computation theory. The work has strong direct links to industrial and other uses of computing, and his early background as a programmer in industry for three years ensures that he takes a pragmatic approach to problem solving.

The coupling of evidential reasoning and other uncertain reasoning techniques with database techniques is particularly promising; contributions have made to the fundamental theory underpinning numeric and non-numeric techniques for handling uncertainty, and to the computational aspects of applying them.