Climate Modeling, plus Data Analytics in the Insurance Industry!

We're delighted to host talks by Chuliang Xiao, Ph.D., postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan’s Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research (https://ciglr.seas.umich.edu), and Scott Slezak, data scientist and Director of Data and Analytics at Farmers Insurance (https://www.farmers.com/homepage-search/).

VIMP: This meeting takes place at Farmers Insurance. If you plan on attending, you must E-MAIL YOUR FIRST AND LAST NAME to Scott at scott.slezak@gmail.com at least 48 HOURS IN ADVANCE of the meeting. This is required by Farmers Insurance security policies. If you have not done so, you will be denied entrance.

At 6 PM, Dr. Xiao will present on Big Data and Climate Modeling. Dr. Xiao works at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL) in Ann Arbor. He specializes in hydro-climatology and climate change in the Great Lakes region using regional numerical climate models. As a climate modeler, Dr. Xiao deals with "Big Meteorological Data" from in-situ observation stations, buoys, radars, satellites, and mostly numerical models. He uses a sophisticated regional climate model (written in Fortran) to conduct century-scale simulations and projections (terabyte scale) of the hydroclimatology in Great Lakes region in terms of precipitation, temperature, ice coverage, river discharge, lake level, etc, with post-processing done by using analysis and visualization programming tools (e.g. NCL, R and Python). Dr. Xiao's presentation should be an interesting source of ideas for data scientists and data analysts in other fields because climate modelers have developed and employ special methods of working with big data.

Pizza will be served at 7 PM, courtesy of Farmers Insurance (https://www.farmers.com/homepage-search/). Thank you, Farmers Insurance!

At 7:15 PM, data scientist Scott Slezak of Farmers Insurance (https://www.farmers.com/homepage-search/) will present "The Rapidly Changing World Of Insurance Analytics." Scott will explain the role of actuaries and data scientists in the insurance industry today, explore applications of modern predictive-modeling techniques such as generalized linear modeling, advanced tree models, and neural networks, as well as discussing catastrophe models and other ways of estimating risk. The intent is to help people understand the complexity behind the dollar amount on their bill, as well as to answer the perpetual question "why did my rate go up?" Scott is a west Michigan native, with a B.S. from Hope College and M.S. in Physics from the University of Chicago. He has been employed at Farmers Insurance in Caledonia for the last sixteen years, currently serving as Director of Data and Analytics. He leads a team of predictive modelers who provide pricing guidance and strategic analysis to product managers, as well as finding efficiencies through process automation and AI throughout the organization. Scott was designated Farmer's Global Employee of the Year in 2010.

The last 5 minutes of the meeting are reserved to solicit your suggestions for topics, presenters, and venues for future meetings.

We look forward to seeing you there.