Description: The cloud inspires awe and fear in equal parts these days. There is a need to learn more, but there’s much information to learn and it may be difficult to know what to learn next. In this session, we’ll carve off a small corner of the cloud and make it your own. Setting up a Data Science Virtual Machine on Digital Ocean will be demonstrated. It’s the fastest way to get a data science development environment setup for your own use. Many of the topics and ideas covered will apply to almost all other cloud offerings. What use cases Digital Ocean is good for, and what use cases you should look elsewhere for, will also be discussed.

Description: Technology is transforming the retirement space and more changes are expected in the future. Join a panel of experts to discuss what are the opportunities, trends and challenges associated with new technologies in the retirement landscape and how it is expected to impact consumers, if we can enable their successful integration.

Description: This article shares our experience of using the cloud to do large-scale parallel processing and discusses some background regarding the cloud.

Description: Overview of evolving industry trends and examples of how life insurers in Canada are innovating.

Description: This article covers the importance of a system peer review within the systems change control process and offers suggestions for creating more robust controls.

Description: This article celebrates the tremendous progress that has been made in automating reinsurance data. It also looks at remaining issues, such as a lack of standardization, and challenges presented for the future.

Description: Certain valuation assumptions are difficult to set with a high degree of accuracy, whether because the underlying experience is in different economic or interest rate environments, in addition to other reasons. Examples include assumptions for long-term care insurance, annuity options, lapsation and premium persistency on ULSG. This session will share how the actuary can use predictive analytics to augment the assumption-setting process. Some of the benefits to the actuary (along with the company and the regulator) include more accurate assumptions with lower margins for adverse deviations. Of possible interest as well is that applications go beyond valuation and include acquisitions, reinsurance and pricing.

Description: The second of three articles exploring the new technology offered by Santa Fe, New Mexico-based Assuratech, Inc. Describes the development of the applied complex adaptive systems technology behind Assuratech’s highly sophisticated program that uses simulation and data mining techniques for accurate, reliable versatile risk modeling.

Description: This report summarizes the results of a Delphi study to identify and debate possible new approaches or Blue Ocean Strategies to acquiring business by life insurers.

Description: The study of Employee Benefits has always been aided by using financial algorithms. During recent semesters, the Lotus 1-2-3 package Lotus has been introduced to students due to the explosion of its use in the business community. This paper will show how our students use Lotus to design a spreadsheet for computing minimum annual distributions from tax-sheltered plans.