[4] Hired in 1984 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, he developed the first modern-day motive classification system for arson for the FBI.

[5] He also developed at the FBI an Artificial Intelligence research project known as PROFILER PDF, a rule-based expert system programmed to detect and link serial violent crimes using data parsed from real-time news stories, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, and other FBI databases.

In May 2015, he joined a board of directors to form the Murder Accountability Project (MAP), a nonprofit organization that detects and disseminates information about homicides, especially unsolved killings and serial murders committed in the United States.

MAP's board consists of a group of retired detectives, investigative journalists, homicide scholars, and a forensic psychiatrist, who strive to use Artificial Intelligence to identify and link clusters of homicides based upon a combination of victim/offender relationships, manner of death, and geographic location.

[9] As of 2019, David Icove is the UL (safety organization) Professor of Practice at The University of Tennessee in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, where he directs their Fire Protection Engineering Graduate Program.