Description: The world is changing at an increasing pace and is disrupting everything from how one orders goods and services to how they take a taxi or Uber. Increasingly, this disruption is affecting the work of actuaries. Moreover, actuaries are being asked to provide more value-added services. Not only is this requiring actuaries to leverage exponential technologies not traditionally used in the insurance industry, but it is also impacting the types of staffing and training models utilized by actuaries. With a broader trend to alternative workforce arrangements, such as the gig economy and crowdsourcing, how will actuaries transition to this new future of working? What are the different types of off-balance sheet workers? How can companies create a strategy to deal with the hybrid workforce that involves different types of workers, cross-country borders, and other changes? This session will outline how actuaries and actuarial functions can successfully prepare themselves for this change.

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.