Dr. Cao is the Director and Founding faculty of the AI Initiative for Capital Market Research and holds the position of associate professor (with tenure) at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland. Additionally, he is an affiliated professor at Harvard Business School (D^3 Institute). Dr. Cao’s research work has gained prominence in respected media outlets such as the Financial Times, CNBC, Bloomberg, The Guardian, Quartz, and IR Magazine. His research papers, some co-authored with PhD students, have received several best paper awards, including the Fama-DFA Prize from Journal of Financial Economics for From Man vs. Machine to Man + Machine: The Art and AI of Stock Analyses and the Michael J. Brennan Award from Review of Financial Studies for How to Talk When Machines are Listening: Corporate Disclosure in the Age of AI. He has published in leading journals across finance, accounting, and computer science including Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Review of Financial Studies, The Accounting Review, Contemporary Accounting Research, Management Science, and IEEE Computer. Dr. Cao also contributes as a guest associate editor at Management Science and co-chaired conferences on FinTech and Machine Learning with the Review of Financial Studies, receiving 450 dual-option submissions.
Dr. Cao is deeply committed to helping business communities through his research. In addition to his role in founding and leading the AI initiative at the University of Maryland, he champions AI’s impact in finance and accounting by delivering over 200 invited research talks at universities and national regulatory and policy-advisory agencies, including the Central Bank of Japan, the Central Bank of Thailand, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He also developed online AI courses on Coursera, through which students can earn credit and a certificate from the University of Maryland.
