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Description: NewsDirect September 2012 issue

Description: Join us for an Economic Outlook Panel that will explore topics like "what are markets saying about likelihood and severity or a recession?" and "how is inflation impacting investment decisions?" Our investment experts speaking at this panel have backgrounds in asset management, insurance and pensions and plan to speak on current macroeconomic trends and their impact on the market. Audience members will have the opportunity to participate and ask question during this live webcast. Prepare for a lively conversation with a panel focused on impacts of our economic environment.

Description: Discover the "101” basics of project management including developing project plans, monitoring progress relative to timelines, facilitating meetings, communicating with the project team and stakeholders, and effective tools to support project management. There will be a focus on the type of technical work actuaries are often asked to manage, such as actuarial modeling projects.

Description: Artificial intelligence brings immense opportunities for productivity gains—and valid concerns. It can both support innovations in insurance products and in the customer experience as well as enhance our profession’s work. Actuaries share a responsibility for caution and professional judgment to use it without jeopardizing the fair and equitable treatment of individual consumers and the principals we serve.AI creates significant challenges for consumers: opacity, reliable accuracy, privacy, and verification of personal data. The Academy and its members have been working to educate and inform stakeholders, insurance commissioners, and regulators toward improving the transparency of algorithms that underlie the use of AI by insurers, to explain how the algorithms can be used to achieve equitable treatment, and to identify the issues and trade-offs related to ensuring consumer protections. We must amplify the actuarial perspective on how adequate disclosures, documentation, and governance of AI can help protect users. This session will examine how we can govern and support the evolution of better practices. We will discuss how AI is addressed via standards such as ASOP No. 56, Modeling, and other guardrails that are being developed to best utilize AI’s real-world potential and fulfill our professional responsibilities.

Description: At the conclusion of the session, attendees will be able to understand the potential for using global population health mortality and morbidity data in actuarial contexts. Using the Global Burden of Disease project as a resource, this session will discuss how novel population health research can be used to complement and fill in the gaps of existing input data sources for actuarial analysis and modeling. Presenters will share the latest academic research on the topics of demography, life expectancy, health-adjusted life expectancy, causes of death and disability, comprehensive disease incidence and prevalence metric, measures of disease burden for patients and populations, modifiable risk factors where there are opportunities to make interventions and improve health outcomes, and disparities between and within populations. This research is globally comprehensive and comparable between different markets and disease areas. The session will cover the motivation and purpose of GBD, a brief description of the models used, and dive deep on some selected use cases in actuarial contexts. Audiences will leave with: 1. Understanding challenges and opportunities in measuring disease burden comprehensively and consistently 2. Understanding relevant health metrics, including the drivers of future mortality and morbidity 3. Ideas for applications of epidemiological research in your work

Description: The expanded use of predictive models, algorithms and external consumer data has drawn the attention of the life insurance industry to the matter of fairness and bias in underwriting, including proposed regulation in states like Colorado and New York and a draft NAIC Model Bulletin. Insurers will benefit taking a proactive approach to verifying that their practices, both current and future, do not result in unfair discrimination. This session will help attendees in understanding potential requirements and reporting insurers must address, techniques and tools for evaluating bias, and challenges in doing so. At the conclusion of the session, attendees will be able to: o Understand proposed regulations and practices regarding fairness and bias o Identify tools and techniques for evaluating bias in their processes o Discuss the challenges the industry will face in addressing fairness in underwriting

Description: In this session, the panelists discuss several common cognitive biases that can adversely impact the capital allocation decision process, introducing the notions of time, accounting convention, positivity, hierarchy, and social proof in describing them. Historical case examples of sub-optimal capital allocation are then explored, identifying the contributing behavioral factors including the simultaneous confluence of multiple factors. The panelists will close the session with several suggestions for attendees to consider for incorporation into their decision-making processes. At the conclusion of the session, attendees will be able to: - Learn common cognitive biases that impact capital allocation decisions - Differentiate which biases impact different aspects of the capital allocation process - Build awareness of biases affecting capital allocation decision models - Mitigate cognitive biases present in decision making processes