The Graduate School of Industrial Administration (GSIA) Accounting Legacy
Herb Simon led the first rigorous study of accounting departments in modern corporations (in 1954).
William (Bill) W. Cooper was the first modern accounting academic, bringing a scientific rigor and interdisciplinary focus to accounting.
Yuji Ijiri (Ph.D 1964), the first PhD graduate in Accounting, later created triple-entry bookkeeping, became the only four-time recipient of AAA's Notable Contributions Award. Yuji's foundational work is our guiding inspiration for studying accounting structure and accountability.
Robert Kaplan served as Dean, co-created Activity-Based Costing and the Balanced Scorecard, whose foundational work on audit sampling inspires the lab’s current work on dynamic and adaptive audit sampling techniques.
Shyam Sunder (Ph.D 1973): Renowned accounting theorist and experimental economists, founded Capital Lab (CapLab), inspired our current lab model to conduct accounting science research.
Jonathan Glover: Renowned accounting and information economics theorist, whose foundational work on the linear algebra of double-entry bookkeeping inspires the lab’s current focus on computational graph-theoretical applications.
The Accounting AI Research Lab Origin Story
The Challenge
Much of current academic accounting research has largely abandoned its management-science, problem-solving roots, leaving practitioners' daily problems to others.
Despite the computing revolution beginning in the 1970s, the accounting academic community had not significantly engaged with computational tools to solve practical accounting problems.
The Opportunity
The emergence of modern computational tools—deep learning, large language models, graph neural networks—presents a new opportunity for accounting research to return to solving pressing practitioner problems.
CMU's unique role in AI puts Tepper in an enviable position to seize these opportunities and return accounting research to its Management Science roots.
Pierre Liang founded the lab in 2023
Primary Collaborators
Interdisciplinary Collaborations
A Vision for the Future
Three Ingredients for Ideal Research
Problem & Data
Real-world problems from practitioners with potential for significant impact on practice
Accounting Theory
Leveraging centuries of accounting knowledge, from double-entry bookkeeping to modern frameworks
Computational Tools
Modern AI and machine learning tools including graph mining and deep learning models