David Smith is an associate professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and a founding member of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, a research center for the digital humanities and computational social sciences. His work focuses on natural language processing and computational linguistics through applications in history, literary studies, political science, journalism, document processing, and assistive technologies.

Smith has received research funding from reputable organizations such as the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Office of Naval Research, Air Force Research Laboratory, the Mellon Foundation, and Google.

Before joining Northeastern, Smith worked for the Tufts University Perseus Digital Library Project—one of the most widely-used linguistic and cultural research systems in the humanities field—and as a research assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He holds a bachelor’s degree in classics (Greek) from Harvard University and a doctoral degree in computer science from Johns Hopkins University.