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Predictive Analytics World for Financial Las Vegas 2019

June 16-20, 2019 – Caesars Palace, Las Vegas


Gary Anderberg
Gary Anderberg

SVP of Claim Analytics Product Management

Gary Anderberg has worked in developing predictive analytic applications for workers' compensation insurance since 2007. He is a recognized expert in the use of PA outputs for guiding the handling of complex claims to drive improved claim outcomes. He is the "godfather" of the Waypoint system and its key role in improving overall decision making and the more effective use of claim resources at Gallagher-Bassett. He will speak to the business case for a system like Waypoint and the corporate cultural and practice issues involved in socializing potentially complex PA system outputs with deeply entrenched work patterns at the end user level. He knows first-hand how the most brilliant PA applications can founder when output and practice cultures clash.

Gary Anderberg is speaking in the following session:

Munish Arora
Munish Arora

Former Senior Director, California State Compensation Insurance Fund, now Founder and Principal, Analytics Ark Consulting

Mr Arora has 18+ years of experience in data and analytics function with focus on financial service and insurance industry. He led a variety of roles as leader of data products, reporting, analytics  and predictive modeling services. With a deeper hands on  predictive modeling experience, passion for mathematics and statistics,  and knowledge of wide variety of software, Mr. Arora is an expert in founding,  growing and transforming enterprise analytic capabilities.

Munish Arora is speaking in the following session:

Dyann Daley MD
Dyann Daley MD

Founder and CEO

Dr. Dyann Daley, MD,  is an experienced pediatric anesthesiologist and child maltreatment prevention executive, specializing in location-based predictive modeling, systems thinking, and development of practical solutions for community-influenced children’s issues.  

Dr. Daley founded and was the executive director of Cook Children’s Center for Prevention of Child Maltreatment in Fort Worth, Texas where she demonstrated the effectiveness of place-based predictive analytics for child maltreatment using spatial risk modeling.  She went on to found Predict Align Prevent, a national nonprofit advancing geospatial machine learning predictions in child welfare, strategic alignment of prevention resources, and implementation of accountable prevention programs to prevent child maltreatment before it happens.  Her organization is committed to open science for social good. 

Dyann Daley MD is speaking in the following session:

Brian Duke
Brian Duke

Data Modeling Director

Brian Duke is a Director of Fraud and Identity Solutions at Experian Decision Analytics and has 12 patents related to modeling enterprise data either issued or pending. He provides technical leadership for data scientists and analysts who bring innovative identity protection and fraud detection products and custom analytical solutions to the North American market. Brian is expert in models and business strategies that integrate a large variety of data assets -- spanning credit and noncredit data, biometrics, behavioral metrics, email and phone intelligence, remote document verification, the dark web and more. He received both his Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and his Master's degree in Statistics from the University of California, San Diego and continues to reside in San Diego.

Chenyu (Jim) Gao
Chenyu (Jim) Gao

Advisory Manager, Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence Accelerator

Jim is a consultant with many years of industrial experience, and currently is an Advisory manager from PricewaterhouseCooper (PwC), serving cross-sector, cross-Industry analytics practice to deliver statistical, machine learning, artificial intelligence consulting and solutions. He played different important roles in financial services, healthcare, hospitality and entertainment sectors which span across operations, marketing, IT and risk, etc. He has background in various machine learning algorithms and multiple AI/big data applications. 

Throughout the past few years, Jim's experience includes:

  • Built credit risk models to predict customer likelihood of default and revenue impact for fortune 100 fintech clients
  • Developed marketing response model (to increase response rate) and revenue model (to identify 'profitable' customers) for a highly reputable marketing leader
  • Analyzed Customer Elasticity to promotional offers and advised effective campaign strategy for a world-prestigious casino resort

Jim holds his master degree in Applied Statistics from Cornell University.

Keith Higdon
Keith Higdon

President

Keith Higdon serves as President of ESIS, Inc., with overall management responsibility for this business. He is based in Chicago.

ESIS is one of the industry’s oldest and largest risk management services companies, providing claim and risk management services to a wide variety of commercial clients in the U.S. and globally. ESIS maintains a sharp focus on helping its clients manage their total cost of loss, offering comprehensive and flexible programs and innovative approaches to claims administration. ESIS is committed to achieving measurable results through consistently superior execution, and employing data analytic and predictive modelling capabilities to track progress.

Previously, Mr. Higdon served as Senior Vice President of Partnership Services for ESIS where he oversaw the management and development of client partnerships across all ESIS lines of business. In addition, he has accountability for new client implementations, ESIS University, ESIS construction practice, and ESIS global initiatives. 

Mr. Higdon has 20 years of industry experience. He began his career in consulting conducting and managing auditing, program evaluation, and program design projects for workers compensation and integrated disability management programs to large employers and service providers. He left consulting for the third-party administrator (TPA) space where he held a variety of positions under information technology and client services developing and delivering differentiated products and services to clients. With a strong focus on information delivery, his previous TPA experience culminated in the management of four departments focusing on client reporting, predictive modeling, client-facing system enhancement and support, and loss control consulting and OSHA administration. Mr. Higdon holds two Bachelor of Science degrees in the social sciences from Northern Illinois University and a master’s degree in information technology and management from Illinois Institute of Technology. He is a board member, and former Chairman, for the Center for Employee Health Studies associated with the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Mr. Higdon supports industry development through participation in regional and national conferences and has published on key topics including integrated disability management, the data lifecycle, and predictive modeling over the years. He is also a volunteer mentor and guest speaker at YearUp, a community college based program for economically disadvantaged students.

Keith Higdon is speaking in the following session:

Richard Lee
Richard Lee

Director of Advanced Analytics

Richard Lee is Director of Data Science for John Hancock, the U.S. division of Toronto-based Manulife.

Richard leads the Advanced Analytics & AI group, which supports operations decision analytics across all U.S. businesses.

In his current role, Richard finds opportunities for efficiencies in Life Insurance as well as Long Term Care Insurance operations. Much of his focus is on innovation to enhance the relevance and understanding of analytics and its impact on operations decision-making.

Prior to his current role, Richard has spent 15 years at John Hancock in various analytics roles

Richard Lee is speaking in the following session:

Nick Magnusson
Nick Magnusson

VP Product/Engineering

As Vice President of Product & Engineering at Big Squid Nick oversees the development and execution of the firm's machine learning software platform, Kraken. He has been with Big Squid since 2015, holds the Chartered Financial Analyst designation, AB from Dartmouth College, and is a former member of the Chicago Quantitative Alliance. When he's not at work he plays soccer, loves cheering at his son's snowboarding competitions and lives in Utah with his wife & two children.

Olaf Menzer
Olaf Menzer

Senior Data Scientist, Decision Analytics

Olaf serves as a Senior Data Scientist in the Decision Analytics team at Pacific Life in Newport Beach, California. He focuses on the design of data driven approaches to improve business decision making and customer experience. Most frequently, he uses tools from time series analysis, machine learning automation and data visualization. To maximize the performance of his models and the measurable impact of his analyses, he enjoys working with internal and external collaborators to formalize facts, to calculate new metrics and to explore new data sources.

Olaf started his career in academia, implementing scientific web tools and conducting research based on ecological, meteorological and geographical data. He has also worked as a Predictive Analyst in the Global Analytics department at Ingram Micro in Irvine, California. He received a M.Sc. in Bioinformatics from Friedrich Schiller University in Germany and a Ph.D. in Geographic Information Science from University of California, Santa Barbara.

Sean Naismith
Sean Naismith

GM & Head Of Analytics Services

Sean joined Enova as Head of Analytics Services for Enova Decisions in 2016. Prior to working at Enova, Sean served as Senior Director of Business Analytics for Leapfrog, where he led the development of the company’s predictive analytics capabilities. Before Leapfrog, Sean served as Director of Strategic Intelligence for TrendPointers, LLC, and Associate Portfolio Manager at Sarasota Capital Strategies. Sean is a CFP® certificant and holds the CMT designation. He received his B.S. in finance from the University of Illinois at Chicago and Financial Planning Certificate from Northwestern University.

Sean Naismith is speaking in the following session:

Mei Najim CSPA
Mei Najim CSPA

Mei Najim currently works as an Applied Analytics Manager at HSBC and teaches part-time as a Data Analytics Lecturer at University of Chicago. Mei has over 18 years of hands-on analytics experience in banking (collections, agent performance, and financial crime), insurance (claim management, underwriting, pricing, reserving, and catastrophe risk management), and consulting.

Since 2007, Mei has mainly been working, leading, and implementing various large scale data analytics and predictive analytics projects to develop analytics capability for financial organizations. She has extensive statistics, machine learning, and data mining experience dealing with large and complex data sets.  She is an analytics thought leader with a positive influence and a clear vision for how analytics can transform business strategy through techniques, communication, and leadership to devise innovative data-driven solutions. 
Mei has been a frequent speaker at various industry conferences to share her expertise in predictive analytics, machine learning, and data science. She holds a BS in actuarial science from Hunan University and two MS degrees in applied mathematics and in statistics, from Washington State University. She is a member of the American Statistical Association and a Certified Specialist in Predictive Analytics (CSPA) of the Casualty Actuarial Society.

Yulin Ning
Yulin Ning

Senior Director in Global Decision Management

Yulin Ning is a Senior Director in Global Decision Management, a global strategy and analytic division in Citi's Global Consumer Bank. He currently leads next generation analytics efforts within Platform and Capability function, acting as a chief data scientist, aiming to accelerate global adoption of big data and machine learning for creative business solutions. He developed expertise in digital (clickstream), text mining, voice analytics, big data, and machine learning. His most recent interests are on deep learning and artificial intelligence.

Over 18 years at Citi, Yulin has been actively involved in building some of the key decision management disciplines in the areas of price management, stress test capabilities, optimization, big data / machine learning roadmap, and data scientist disciplines. He worked with a range of financial and technology companies, vendors, and universities specializing in analytics and emerging technologies. He holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics.

Zeydy Ortiz
Zeydy Ortiz

CEO

Dr. Zeydy Ortiz is the co-founder & CEO of DataCrunch Lab, LLC.  She has been helping teams and organizations transform data into value across many industries including IT,  financial, retail, and the manufacturing sectors.  Her team built an innovative, award-winning digital assistant that was recognized as 'Highest Potential Value to Manufacturers' for increasing visibility of real-time production and plant operations. 

She started her career as a Performance Engineer at IBM building predictive models to inform business strategy.  She worked on multiple projects focused on improving performance & efficiency.  She earned recognition for innovation on Smarter Planet/IoT solutions and for her industry contributions defining resource efficiency metrics. Dr. Ortiz obtained her bachelor's degree from the University of Puerto Rico, master's from Texas A&M University, and Ph. D. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University.

Andreas Petrides PhD
Andreas Petrides PhD

Executive Director, Quantitative Execution Services

Andreas is an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs Quantitative Execution Services, focusing on signal research for execution algorithms. Andreas has received a PhD in Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge, working on the interface of stochastic control theory and Bayesian machine learning. Andreas also holds a BA and an MEng degree in Electrical and Information Sciences from Trinity College, University of Cambridge, during which he has received the G-Research and TTP awards.

Andreas Petrides PhD is speaking in the following session:

Bill Rachilla
Bill Rachilla

Product Manager

Bill is responsible for the diwo product strategy and development. He is a graduate of Lawrence Technological University and brings more than 20 years of software product management experience in the retail, automotive, manufacturing and financial services verticals

Bill Rachilla is speaking in the following session:

Simon Ringuette
Simon Ringuette

Senior Architect

Simon has been working at Trisotech for the last 15 years where he leads the software development team responsible for producing its SaaS digital transformation and automation suite. He also has been deeply involved the standardization of the Business Process Management domain by working on standards such as BPMN, CMMN, DMN, XPDL and BPSim. He received a bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering and is also an OMG Certified expert in BPM at the advanced level in both the business and technical tracks. Simon currently works at the Trisotech head office in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Simon Ringuette is speaking in the following session:

Rob Rolleston
Rob Rolleston

Manager, Data Science

Rob Rolleston is the Manager, Data Science at Paychex. Previously Rob worked at Xerox in the areas of Information Visualization, Strategy & Planning, and Color Management. He has 47 issued patents, and numerous technical publications and presentations.

He received his B.S. in Computational Physics from Carnegie-Mellon University, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Optics from the University of Rochester. Rob recently completed an MPS Degree in Information Visualization from Maryland Institute College of Arts, and is now an instructor for the program where he teaches statistics and data analysis. Rob has also been an adjunct professor and instructor at Rochester Institute of Technology. He has served on the Executive Advisory Board for the New York State Center for Electronic Imaging Systems, the Advisory Board for the Rochester Institute of Technology Center for Imaging Science, and was chair of the Xerox University Affairs Committee.

Rob Rolleston is speaking in the following session:

Mohammad Shokoohi-Yekta
Mohammad Shokoohi-Yekta

Senior Data Scientist

Mohammad is currently a Senior Data & Applied Scientist at Microsoft, and Instructor at Stanford University. He is a former Data Scientist at Apple and previously worked for Samsung, Bosch, General Electric and UCLA Research Labs. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Riverside and B.Sc. from University of Tehran. Mohammad is the author of the book, ‘Applications of Mining Massive Time Series Data'. He has also been a keynote speaker at more than 40 Data Summits/Conferences around the globe. 

Mohammad Shokoohi-Yekta is speaking in the following session:

Michael Steliaros
Michael Steliaros

Managing Director

Michael Steliaros is the global head of Quantitative Execution Services at Goldman Sachs. He is responsible for the research, development and implementation of quantitative processes for portfolio and electronic trading as well as managing the bank's relations with the quantitative client base. Previously, Michael held a variety of senior roles at BofAML in London and New York, most recently running the global agency portfolio trading and quantitative equity businesses. Earlier in his career, he spent a decade on the buy-side (most notably BGI and Winton) building quant stock-selection models and managing global market neutral equity portfolios. Michael received a bachelor's degree in Economics & Econometrics from the University of Nottingham, and an MSc and PhD in Finance from City University (CASS) Business School in London.


Michael Steliaros is speaking in the following session:

Nathan Susanj
Nathan Susanj

Applied Science Manager

Previously Nathan was a data scientist on the Wells Fargo Enterprise Analytics and Data Science team where he led a small team as head of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Speech Capabilities Development, and was focused on building out Wells Fargo's capabilities in areas related to NLP, deep learning and data science product design. Nathan holds a Masters in Predictive Analytics from Northwestern University and is working on his second Masters in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. He has been with Wells Fargo for the past five years and worked in marketing analytics prior to his current role.

William WIlkins
William WIlkins

Senior Vice President, Advanced Analytics and Practical Applications

Bill joined Safety National in 2008, held several different positions within Safety National, in pricing, product development, reserving and risk until being named Senior Vice President, Advance Analytics and Practical Applications in 2023. Bill’s focus is on research and strategic use of third party data, creating innovative predictive analytics capabilities via new tools, new technology and insurtech capabilities to build a pipeline of projects for the Data Analytics department to develop and operationalize.

Prior to joining Safety National, Bill held various executive actuarial roles with global and regional carriers. Bill has been a speaker or panelist at various insurance and tech industry conferences and has contributed to articles on industry-related topics. Bill chaired the American Property Casualty Insurance Association ERM Committee 2022-2023.

William WIlkins is speaking in the following session:

Theodore Ziton
Theodore Ziton

Vice President - Risk Analytics

Ted Ziton has worked in various aspects of analytics for insurance carriers, brokerages and managed care organizations for the last twenty five years. He joined Gallagher-Bassett in 2015 and is the point man for GB's first AI predictive system, Waypoint. The original Waypoint application was designed to help adjusters establish and monitor claim reserves on complex claims. Since Ted took the helm, Waypoint has gone through multiple upgrades and new functionalities have been added or are currently in development. Ted has the primary responsibility for turning the multiple predictive outputs of Waypoint into easily understood information which can be used by adjusters to make better decisions in handling claims and to better understand the cost drivers of individual claims.

Theodore Ziton is speaking in the following session: