Description: Increasing technology is available to create and disseminate educational resources worldwide. In response, this article advocates creation of open educational resources (OERs) that will benefit the actuarial profession with both recruitment and retention of members. Specifically, we describe OER contributions made at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and more recently through the ASTIN Academy, a working group of ASTIN, the non-life section of the International Actuarial Association. We advocate pushing boundaries and creating new ways of teaching effectively for the future. The innovative use of technology and open-source materials is a way to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion in the actuarial profession.

Description: Identifies current trends and considerations when setting the mortality improvement assumption for individual life insurance in the US.

Description: Using the Cox proportional Hazards Model to improve underwriting debits and credits.

Description: Feature article discussing futurism and a study that contains in-depth descriptions of the Delphi and TIA methods; listings of the rationales and thought processes, the plausible future developments that could influence the values of these four economic variables and the resulting “fan of possibilities” for the values of these variables

Description: Description of methods for extracting and reformatting the existing mortality tables using R. Methods and formats for storage are discussed in the second article. Intent is to generate discussion regarding the format of our stored mortality tables. Value is in the demonstration of task automation in R and in the reduction of duplicate work across companies related to reformatting tables.

Description: Technology has streamlined countless processes in our daily lives, and insurance is no stranger to this transformation. Technology can make insurance simpler and more personal for consumers, and can enable actuaries to better analyze unstructured data, make good decisions, create new products, and find channels to enhance profitability, provided they can tame the flood of information pouring in from across the digital ecosystem.

Description: Python is the leading programming language for data science. Python programming is one skill that actuaries should acquire. It facilitates analytic work, and the available visualization tools help to communicate ideas. In this article, I use a traditional actuarial problem, mortality modeling, as an example.

Description: Ways of closing the mortality protection gap, by leveraging some of the new technology, data and analytics to reduce the friction in the buying process.

Description: The article explores the possibility of using the emerging technology for life insurers to build a monitor system for better risk and profitability management.

Description: Defines Accelerated Underwriting programs as a transformational trend, and outlines a process for evaluating mortality implications of such programs.