October 2014

Outstanding Presentations and Posters at the 2014 ARC

At each year’s Actuarial Research Conference (ARC), the Education and Research Section offers cash prizes for outstanding presentations by graduate and undergraduate students. Presenters are judged on the quality of the delivery of their presentation, with a focus on presentation skills, such as vocal projection, connection with the audience and quality of slides.

At this year’s conference, held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, there were 17 student presentations and, among these, the following were chosen for cash prizes.

Winner
  • Yuchen Mei (University of Waterloo) – “Introduction to Housing Finance and Mortgage Insurance”
Honorable Mention (in no particular order)
  • Marie-Pier Côté (McGill University) – “A Copula-Based Risk Aggregation Model”
  • Andrew Hunt (Cass Business School, City University London) – “Forward Mortality Rates: Applications to the Risk management of Annuities”
  • Samuel Perreault (Université Laval) – “Constrained Clustering of Territories: A “k-means”-Based Algorithm Aiming to Minimize Intra-cluster Variation in the Context of Car Insurance”
  • Wenyuan Zheng (University of Connecticut) – “Portfolio Choice with life Annuities under Probability Distortion”
  • Gao Niu (University of Connecticut) – “Agent Based Modeling of P&C Underwriting Cycles”

In addition, prizes were given to the outstanding posters submitted at ARC. The following were chosen for cash prizes:

Joint First Prize Winners
Jinyuan Zhang (University of British Columbia) – “Extreme Behavior for Bivariate Skew-Elliptical Distribution

Richard Pulliam (University of California – Santa Barbara) – “Pure Premium Trend Analysis for Auto and Home Insurance Coverages”

First Runner-Up
David Smith (Cass Business School, City University London) – “Using Patient Records to Investigate Mortality and Deprivation)

Congratulations to all!