Over the last years, typical data science tasks like data manipulation and modeling have gained a stronger foothold in the day-to-day professional life of the actuary. Open source languages are renowned to be especially equipped to deal with these kind of tasks, but can also be tricky to get started with, especially when one has not been properly introduced to them.
Open source tools like R, Python and more recently Julia have gained a lot of momentum in recent years, not just in popularity but also in number of contributed code. Their respective communities are nowadays no longer exclusively composed of academic researchers and scientists, but also of professionals of all sorts of backgrounds, especially since the industry and corporate world have understood the added value of ‘community driven software’ and started to plug open source tools into their processes and corporate tissue.
On top of this, actuaries are confronted with the same issues as academic researchers and scientists: the production of readable, shareable and reproducible code and results.

Organised by the EAA - European Actuarial Academy GmbH.

This web session is suited for all actuaries who like to broaden their existing IT toolset. Basic knowledge regarding data analysis and/or development of actuarial tools is useful, yet not required.

Technical requirements and test session
Please check with your IT department if your firewall and computer settings support web session participation (the programme GoToTraining is used for the web session). Please also make sure that you are joining the web session with a stable internet connection. 

On 16 April 10:00 – 10:30 CEST, there will be a test session offered to all registered participants to test the software.

During this web session, an introduction to the basic building blocks of Python are presented, as well as some basic techniques like reading in data and plotting out your results. The competences that will be transmitted to you during this web session will enable you to set your first steps analyzing your own data and will allow you to appreciate and understand other existing Python tools more easily.

The language of the web session will be English.

Luc Kesters
Luc Kesters is a consulting life actuary for over 20 years. The last 15 years he’s working with Vereycken & Vereycken, a Belgian based insurance software development and consultancy company, on actuarial and IT related jobs with a strong focus on reporting.  During his career IT solutions and technology have always taken up an important part of his work. In that context, he uses Python amongst others on a daily basis.