Description: Ever wanted to do a Kaggle data science competition, but didn't know where to start? This presentation meets the needs of actuaries interested in predictive analytics and competitive data science. The presentation will describe the nature of competitive data science, and provide insights into lessons learned by competing in the Airbus Ship Detection Challenge at Kaggle, as well as other Kaggle competitions. The presenters will provide an introduction to neural networks and describe the nature of the Airbus Ship Detection Challenge and other Kaggle competitions, plus a solution approaches that can be used to obtain top scores using Convolutional Neural networks (CNNs), random forests and boosted trees.

Description: Feature article describing what author thinks it will take for a life insurance company to be successful in the year 2020.

Description: Cloud computing is a major disruptor to nearly all software products, and actuarial software is no different. Insurers need to start thinking about how they are going to work with their venders to move to the next level of actuarial infrastructure.

Description: A story of one actuary's experience using technology over the past 25 years.

Description: This discussion focuses on two question: First, How are the annual statement items such as reserves, dividends, insurance in force, etc developed and organized. Second, what new or unusual methods of calculating reserves, net premiums, and expected mortality have been developed through the use of computers?

Description: The aim of this research is to survey emerging data analytics techniques and discuss their evolution and growing use in the actuarial profession. Data analytics’ applications in life and non-life insurance will also be provided.

Description: The Society of Actuaries' Pension Section and Health Section Research teams originally commissioned Professor Thomas E. Getzen of Temple University to construct a resource model for the projection of long term healthcare cost trends. The Society of Actuaries continues to make annual updates to the model to ensure its usefulness and relevancy.

Description: The famous 80/20 rule in data science states that only 20% of your time working with data is spent driving insightful business analytics. The rest of your time is spent trying to query, clean and organize your data. Even with this knowledge, the majority of actuarial training/focus is on the 20 percent. This session takes a different approach, focusing solely on speeding up your work on the other 80 percent. Practical examples will be part of a code walkthrough in R.

Description: Digital savvy consumers are demanding a change in the way they engage with their insurance carriers. As smartphone owners utilize their devices for financial management more than ever, insurance carriers aim to create a similar seamless digital strategy, offering customers a personalized experience on multiple platforms. Cloud-based applications also enable productivity, accountability and innovation in the insurance industry. Discover avenues of customer engagement through digital platforms, including new technologies and products, and why the value of data and data science is critical for business, such as adaptability, marketing and insightful pricing. Presenters will also touch on: - managing retention and lapses through data-driven continuous improvement cycling - high-level system architectures illustrating how multiple applications (front/mid/back office systems) will integrate with each other and share connected data example data points being captured within various marketing systems - data collection within various digital platforms - data science applications that help with business growth, retention, lapsation, effectiveness and cross-sell/up-sell opportunities, and the implications to actuarial functions - value and risk to carriers in the new digital paradigm

Description: Feature article discussing the benefits of using spreadsheet controls.