CAS Open Source Software

Hello! Ben Escoto, chair of the Open Source Software Committee has asked me to lead a subcommittee responsible for Webinars, Seminars and Presentations.

First order of business: Are you interested in joining? If so, please respond to this thread.

Second order of business: Let's change the name! I was thinking about Education and Outreach. Potential downside in that it abbreviates to E&O.

Third order of business: Discuss, share ideas and plan how to contribute to the CAS' efforts to increase the knowledge and use of R and other open source tools in our profession.

I'd be interested in presenting on uses of R, especially R integration with knitr; DVCS; or Rcpp. I don't know how long it would take me to put something together and when I would have time to do so, though.

I would be interested in joining this group. Joe Marker, Hai You and myself would be willing to put on a CAS webinar on the CAS open source Loss Simulation Model. The interface is programmed in VB.net, but the engine is in R. The link below will take you to the LSM site so you can see or review what this model is all about: http://www.casact.org/research/lsmwp/.

An alternative name for the group might be Webinars, Education and Presentations (WEP). It sounds like a technical acronym which might fit our nerdy image.

But WEP should never be used anymore, it's cracked. WPA2 should be the only choice :)

Hmmm. "Webinars, Presentations, and Actuarial Analysis" = WPAA = WPA² = WPA2

I'd be interested in helping out.

I'm pretty much an amateur at R.
So, I'm probably not the best person to present on any technical aspects of R.

I might have some insight on Don's comment about getting buy-in from underwriters and management. I've been working through those kinds of issues pretty regularly the last year or two.

Also, I'd be willing to help coordinating presentations.

I could possibly do a webinar on Excelsi-R, the Excel add-in I've worked on. If there's need I could also do a webinar on other topics. For instance, a year or two ago I did a CAS webinar on predictive modeling.

About the name, it's not a requirement that the abbreviation be geeky! But I think I like Bob's suggestion of WEB because the "E&O project" sounds kind of ominous.

Here's what I have so far for folks who want to be members:

• Me
• Don Hendriks
• Yun Li
• Bob Bear
• Tim Garcia
• Adam Rich
• Steve Berman
• Avraham Adler

Topics so far:

• Uses of R - Avi
• The CAS loss simulation model - Bob
• Excelsi-R - Ben
• MRMR - Brian

There's also some loose talk that Jim Guszcza would like to create a webinar.

Does that more or less capture it? I'm (very slowly) trying to get some guidance from the education and webinars committees to understand what parameters exist to structure this. I think supporting four special purpose webinars a year makes sense, though I'm not sure how much the CAS can support. I also like the idea of shorter instructional videos hosted by Vimeo or YouTube or whatever which may be linked on this wiki. The ChainLadder page on Google has several and they're a very nice entry point for novices.

Questions? Comments?