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Abstract:

As our world is becoming ever more focussed on risk and its applications, actuarial techniques are evolving and becoming more sophisticated to cope with the demands of business and regulators. At Towers Watson, we are at the leading edge of these developments, both from a software and consulting perspective. In this talk, we will focus on the topical area of capital modelling and discuss how your mathematical and scientific backgrounds can benefit our world leading capital modelling work.

Abstract:

Weather and climate models have become increasingly important tools for making society more resilient to extremes of weather and for helping society plan for possible changes in future climate. These models are based on known laws of physics, but, because of computing constraints, are solved over a considerably reduced range of scales than are described in the mathematical expression of these laws. This generically leads to systematic errors when models are compared with observations. A new paradigm is proposed for solving these equations which sacrifices precision and determinism for small-scale motions. It is suggested that this sacrifice may allow the truncation scale of weather and climate models to extend down to cloud scales in the coming years, leading to more accurate predictions of future weather and climate.

About the Speaker:

Tim Palmer has been a Royal Society Research Professor of Climate Physics at Oxford University since 2010. After his PhD at Oxford in general relativity theory, Tim worked at the Meteorological Office, the University of Washington and the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts, where he led a team which developed the medium-range and seasonal ensemble prediction systems. Tim's research spans a range of work, both theoretical and practical, in the field of dynamics and predictability of weather and climate. He won the 2014 Institute of Physics Dirac Gold Medal for his research on probabilistic weather and climate prediction.

Abstract:

At each stage in the workflow between seismic and economics, and at each stage in an oil field's lifecycle, there are various probabilistic and deterministic processes which feed into an understanding of the value of the asset and the optimum ways to drill and operate. This talk discusses simulation-based probabilistic forecasting, and describes a scientific and validated approach to uncertainty which uses the very latest Monte Carlo techniques. This contrasts with the black box 'trust me' approach which has often been the norm for probabilistic uncertainty in our industry.

About the Speaker:

Nigel Goodwin has 35 years experience in the upstream and downstream oil and gas business, working with both software vendors and oil companies. He was a co-founder and software director of Energy Scitech Ltd. which led to the development of EnABLE, the leading commercial history matching and uncertainty tool, subsequently acquired by Roxar. He is the founder of Essence Products and Services Ltd., which has recently released EssRisk, the next generation history matching and uncertainty quantification tool. He specialises in optimisation, statistics, and software design. He has BA, MMath and PhD degrees in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics from Cambridge U. and Manchester U.