Description: This is the presidential address by former President of the Society of Actuaries, Malvin E. Davis. His topic was the current position of the American United States and Canadian life insurance actuary, the problems that face him and the Society of Actuaries, and what the Society should do to address those problems.

Description: Presented at May 2005 Spring Meeting. Panelists discuss the importance of actuarial research, how and what to do, researching the literature, statistical tests of significance, writing a research report and how to get published.

Description: 1993 SOA Spring Meeting, Boston. This session provided an overview of the insurance industry around the world. Topics included: 1. What does it take to become an actuary in foreign countries? 2. Professional Standards of Practice. 3. Disciplinary Standards. 4. Education programs supported by the SOA in developing countries.

Description: The actuarial profession is marching into the age of Big Data. Increasingly, employers in various actuarial fields are requiring new hires to have sophisticated knowledge in statistics and data science. To meet the new demands from the industry and the profession, one of the key additions to the SOA’s new curriculum is an exam in Statistics for Risk Modeling (SRM) which includes modern statistical and data science techniques. There is also a new proctored project on Predictive Analytics, as a capstone requirement following the completion of the SRM Exam. At the University of Toronto, we recently underwent a major actuarial science curriculum redesign, in order to stay current with new trends and demand from the profession and in line with the new professional curriculum.

Description: Traditionally the SOA formulates pedagogic excellence in terms of the Marzano Taxonomy. For example, the "analysis level" consisting of generalization, specification, classification, contrast, matching, and error identification, is considered superior to the "retrieval level" consisting of rote memorization such as recognition, recall, and using. In this presentation, we first show that pedagogic excellence can be equivalently, but more simply, formulated in terms of executive function and goal-setting. Here executive function refers to problems requiring multiple mental modalities - such as, formal, verbal, computational, and graphical - for their solution. Goal-setting refers to the skillful breakup of a complex problem into a sequence of subgoals each of which is clearly formulated, challenging, but achievable timely. Light examples from the literature illustrate these concepts. Five "challenging FM problems": reinvestment, refinancing, multiple rate/deposit problems, pricing deferred bonds using a term structure, and obscure loan problems, illustrate the following fundamental techniques of goal-setting and executive function: i) a fellowship approach to teaching preliminary exam material, ii) using subgoals to give difficult homework, iii) alternating between different mental modalities to achieve elegant brevity in solutions, iv) goal-setting reflecting familiar vs. new, and v) skillful definition of unit subgoals.

Description: Since the world in which actuaries work is both expanding (through 'data science' opportunities) and contracting (since 'data scientists' are doing work formerly done by actuaries), the role of education actuaries is at a tipping point. Members of the Society who are in higher education and representatives from the business community will discuss ways in which the two worlds of business and education have worked together in the past, what can be done by each group to assist the other, and what the future may hold.

Description: The Society of Actuaries (SOA) is a membership organization dedicated to education, research, and the profession. This session will provide an overview of the SOA and its various university programs and initiatives.