Category Archives: Trip

Back to work, in Rennes

This is the end of the summer break. I will spend this year in Rennes. And probably also in various places, to work with colleagues, as well as working on some data science for actuaries programs. There will be more information on the blog, before the end of 2014. Including probably a lot of codes…

London, Bayes and the Lloyd’s

Monday, we really had a great conference in London.

It was a great pleasure since I did learn a lot of things. And also a great honor to be the last speaker. Tuesday morning, I wanted to go to Thomas Bayes’grave, which is the the graveyard next to the CASS Business School. I had a good a apriori about where the grave should be,

but to be honest, it was not possible to get close enough to be able to read the name on it (even if I now know that it is the large one in the right lower corner of the picture)

Actually, on the internet, you can find some picture where the stone is clean, so you can learn that the grave is the “cotton” one – at least, you can easily read that name.

It was actualy more simple to see William Blake’s grave, as well as Daniel Defoe’s.

Then, with Leo, we’ve been to the Lloyd’s to see some friends, as well as Richard Rogers’s building.

At the 11th floor, you have a lot of rooms for meetings, as well as old paintings, to tell a bit more about the history of the company,

The building is just amazing. Unfortunately, to get in, there is a dress code. A sort of strict one actually. Leo is working for RBC, so he casually wears a suit. But I don’t. I mean, I did have a shirt, but as someone mentioned, “there is no collar !” (I don’t want to put my friend into trouble for helping me getting in).

So, after going throught the basement, we’ve been able to reach the elevator, and go on top.

The building is not exactly located where Edward Lloyd got his coffee shop (even after moving at the end of 1691 on Lombard street), but the Lloyd’s is still a legend for anyone interested in the history of insurance, and more generally, the history of risk modeling (and management).

Càdiz, Nonparametric Statistics

Emmanuel Flachaire will be presenting some joint work in Càdiz, Spain, tomorrow evening, at the second conference of the International Society of NonParametric Statistics. Jeff invited me a few months ago, to go there, but unfortunately, I’ve already been moving a lot recently. The talk will be based on the same work that I mentioned at the SSC annual conference (Canadian Statistical Society), in Toronto, at the end of May. His talk is on quantiles and inequality indices estimation from heavy-tailed distribution. As mentioned in my previous post, we will upload the slides (and the paper) in a close future.

So, Emmanuel will go there, and enjoy the beach (and the conference, the program is truly amazing).

Graduate Crash Course on Risk Measures

Tomorrow morning, I will give a crash course on risk measures at Louvain-la-Neuve, in Belgium. This is a crash course of PhD students (and researchers) with a long introduction on the univariate static framework (and some mathematical tools that will be interesting later on, such as the Fenchel transform and more generally on convexity, as well as some results on optimal transport). I will also mention what was obtained in decision theory, inspired by Itzhak Gilboa‘s Theory of Decision under Uncertainty. Then I will mention extensions to derive multiple risk measures, based on Marc Henry and Alfred Galichon‘s work. Finally, I will conclude by introducing the difficulty to derive dynamic risk measures.

The slides are based on a document I am still working on. And unfortunately, the deeper I get to explain the roots of the axioms, or the assumptions, the more papers I discover (and I need to read, and understand). So I guess I will need some time to finalize my survey. Note that I decided to skip details on technical issues when working on , and the weak topology on the dual of . I will try to add additional references in the notes, but I wanted the slides to be as simple as possible. I also want to add more connections with statistical results, such as Neyman Pearson’s lemma, for instance (as mentioned in a paper by Alexander Schied). All my apologies for the typos, too.

Short (but Buzy) Trip in Europe

I will flight tomorrow evening to go to Belgium. I will attend a PhD defense this Monday, at Louvain-la-Neuve. On Tuesday, I will give a crash course on risk measures, for PhD Students, in Louvain-la-Neuve. Then, Wednesday morning, I have a meeting with some friends in an insurance company, in Brussels, and I will be around noon in Paris, to give a talk on Big Data, for the Big Data Task Force of the (French) Institute of Actuaries. I will then have some meetings in the afternoon. I should flight back on Thursday, and give my lecture on Predictive Modeling in the evening…

I guess that Saturday will be a mix between two very different activities, enjoying some time with the kids (and watch the game), and trying to finalize my slides…

Talk at CIMAT, Guanajuato, Mexico

I will be back in Guanajuato, Mexico, this week, to visit Victor Rivero. And I will give a talk at the Centro de Investigacion en Matematicas (CIMAT) this Wednesday on “Multivariate Archimax Copulas“. The slides are already online.

(there is a lot of material on copulas, as requested, to provide an introduction for students not familiar with this concept).

Quelques jours à Rennes

J’ai quitté Montréal hier soir, juste après le cours…

… et je serais de passage à Rennes pour quelques jours, pendant toute la semaine. Au programme, quatre jours de travail avec des co-auteurs, place Hoche, histoire de finir des papiers qui traînaient depuis (beaucoup) trop longtemps. Promis, j’en reparlerais dès que les documents seront en ligne ! En attendant, je sais retrouver la ville pendant quelques jours, et je compte en profiter autant que possible !

A few days in Atlanta

I will be in Atlanta for the week-end, for a SoA meeting. Last time I went to an SoA meeting (in Chicago), I did mention a connexion between baseball and mathematics (and Paul Erdös). This, time, I can probably mention a connexion between basketball and acturial science. More precisely, a great basketball player named Peter “Pistol Pete” Press Maravich. In an interview in 1974 (while he was playing with the Hawks of Atlanta), Maravich had said, “I don’t want to play 10 years [in the NBA] and then die of a heart attack when I’m 40.” Unfortunately, this is what happened, somehow. On January 5th, 1988, he collapsed after a three-on-three pickup game in Pasadena, California, and died of a heart attack. Pete Maravich was 40.