The 11th International Congress on Insurance: Mathematics and Economics (IME)
The 11th International Congress on Insurance: Mathematics and Economics (IME)
By Enrique de Alba
The 11th International Congress on Insurance: Mathematics and Economics (IME) was held in Piraeus, Greece on July 10–12, 2007. It was organized by the Department of Statistics and Insurance Science of the University of Piraeus, under the chairmanship of Prof. Georgios Pitselis. The Scientific Committee was headed by Prof. Hans Gerber, from University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Over the past 10 years, the IME Congress has established itself as one of the main actuarial conferences worldwide. Its purpose is to provide researchers (both actuaries and non–actuaries) with the opportunity to present their latest work in the general area of actuarial science. Hence it is attended mostly by academics, from all over the world. Over the years it has been held in the Netherlands, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Spain, United States, Portugal, France, Italy, Canada, and Belgium. The next IME Congress will be in China.
There were two plenary sessions and around 160 talks, with nearly as many participants. Curiously, most of the participants from North America were from Canada and Mexico, with very few from the United States. The plenary sessions were on credibility theory and on optimization on problems in non–life insurance. The first was given by Ragnar Norberg of the London School of Economics and the second by Hanspeter Schmidli, from the University of Cologne, Germany. The regular talks covered topics over the whole spectrum of actuarial science, including both theoretical as well as applied topics. There were sessions on life and nonlife insurance, risk theory, pension mathematics, economics of insurance, and finance.
Piraeus is next to Athens, the capital city of Greece, so that participants had an opportunity to visit spectacular archaeological sites, such as the Parthenon. In fact, the social events of the congress included a visit the historic Temple of Poseidon on Cape Sounio and dinner at the beautiful Marathon Lake.