Description: A review of the Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization courses with special emphasis on how they may be useful to actuaries.

Description: Insurance regulations are undergoing a paradigm shift in determining capital and reserves. With Solvency II in Europe and principle-based reserving in the United States, the old formula-based static approach is being replaced or supplemented by a principle-based dynamic method. This change requires enhanced modeling, stochastic simulation and sensitivity analysis, which pose challenges to insurers whose infrastructure has not been built for big computation. This paper introduces a method of building complicated models with small reusable modules and running them on a many-task computing platform to achieve high performance with simplicity. The paper presents an example of a term life insurance model built to take advantage of computer hardware for parallel computing at the task level.

Description: A summary of a survey the Society of Actuaries recently conducted of health payer and provider executives to glean insights into predictive analytics trends.

Description: An exploration of moving predictive modeling capabilities in R to real time operations.

Description: This article will be focused on maximizing the reuse of code using features available within Moody’s Axis specifically targeted at using Formula Link.

Description: A first look, and actuarial review of an electronic book for actuaries who wish to learn Excel beyond the basics.

Description: This article describes in detail how Microsoft Excel spreadsheets can be used to develop and test relational database projects.

Description: A description of the Technology Section's goals and accomplishments.

Description: Letter from the editor describing the contents of the issue.