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Edition

2009 Actuarial Research Conference

2009 Actuarial Research Conference

By Edward W. (Jed) Frees

I am pleased to announce that the 2009 Actuarial Research Conference (ARC) will be hosted by the University of Wisconsin (UW) in Madison on July 30–Aug. 1, 2009. These dates were selected to keep with the tradition of an early August meeting that does not overlap with the American Risk and Insurance Meeting (August 2–5) and the American Statistical Association meeting (August 3–7).

This is the 44th edition of this annual conference. In the coming months, we will send out the usual call for contributed papers that comprise a majority of the program. In keeping with tradition, we will continue the practice of opening the conference to all areas of actuarial practice. Further, we will continue to promote the recent conference themes of education and interaction with industry with a UW flavor, empirical aspects of actuarial science.

For this version of the ARC, we will experiment with three new initiatives. First, we will have poster sessions that will allow interactive sessions with presenters. Poster sessions are used at many other scientific meetings and are particularly suitable for presenting late-breaking work and/or featuring results by younger researchers. Second, we will sponsor Web facilities to encourage presenters to share their results via posting abstracts, presentations, papers, sample code and so forth. Third, we will hold a special half-day satellite meeting on Saturday afternoon. This meeting will be composed of invited panelists from industry who will describe research projects, agenda and administration within their companies. This session is designed to promote interactions between academia and industry. We anticipate having a focus on predictive modeling with representatives from health and the property and casualty practices.

I hope that you will consider attending the conference in Madison. You will find this to be a fun, safe and relaxing place to visit. You will find a little promotional material from our visitor's Bureau at VisitMadison.com. The site of the conference will be in the brand–new $40 million wing of our Business School building. As we continue to recruit sponsors for the conference, we hope to provide you with an entertaining and intellectually stimulating program.

Please stay tuned to the SOA Web site and Bus.wisc.edu/arc2009 for more details. See you July 30, 2009 in Madison!