HIPERFITSeminar in May and Martin Elsman
Welcome to a new edition of our HIPERFIT newsletter, announcing the next seminar talks and an important new member.
Due to the public holiday tomorrow, we are again moving our seminar by one week.
The next seminar will be on Tuesday, May 8, 3pm, in Mødelokale A/B at DIKU, Universitetsparken 1.
We could win two external speakers who will talk to us about exciting research topics related to HIPERFIT.
Under the title “Statically Typed Pensions”, David Christiansen from ITU will introduce us to a domain-specific language (DSL) developed in the context of project ACTULUS. Actulus is a research project in actuarial mathematics, involving Mogens Steffensen from IMF who is also leading the mathematical finance research in HIPERFIT. In ongoing work, David is developing a DSL for declaratively specifying life insurance and pension plans, as well as probabilistic models of the events upon which their valuation depends. He will present the language as it currently exists with special emphasis on the type system. The talk was originally planned for the cancelled April seminar.
Michael Christensen from ALOC (Odense) gives the second talk of the seminar:
“Does your organization support evaluation and decision-making?”
We might summarise it as “Idiots vs. Game Theorists”, but rather use Michal’s own words: The talk is based on a study [1] of the organization and procedures surrounding the evaluation of credit applications (in the order of 100 million dollars per year) in a Danish bank. The analysis relies on a screening formalism [2], which at the heart assumes individuals to be fallible, to examine the impact of organizational structure on organizational performance. Recent dynamic models explain the remarkable adaptability observed in the data at the level of the individual. This validation of the theory carries a promise of applicability: How do I design the optimal organization?
There will also be the opportunity for informal chats about the 3rd HIPERFIT workshop, which took place in Chicago on 21-23 April in cooperation with the Stevanovich Center for Financial Mathematics.
At the same time, the May seminar marks the debut of an important new member of staff in HIPERFIT. We are very excited to announce that Martin Elsman is joining the HIPERFIT team. Martin will fill the position of the HIPERFIT center manager, which is an associate professorship at the Department of Computer Science (DIKU).
From April 2008 to May 2012, Martin worked as Chief System Development Consultant and Team Leader in SimCorp, one of the HIPERFIT partners, so he is well-known to core HIPERFIT staff. We are very happy that we could win Martin Elsman for our academic staff at DIKU, as he can also build on substantial previous experience in the university context: He was associate professor at ITU before joining SimCorp, and obtained important research results in program analysis, type systems, module systems, as well as compilation and optimisations, in the context of Standard ML (MLKit).
A warm welcome to Martin Elsman!
We are looking forward to seeing you at our May seminar.
Best regards from HIPERFIT
[1] Michael Christensen and Thorbjørn Knudsen. The Architecture of Knowledge Organization. In Knowledge Governance: Processes and Perspectives (red. Nicolai J. Foss, Snejina Michailova; Oxford University Press):47-80, 2009.
[2] Michael Christensen and Thorbjørn Knudsen. Design of decision-making organizations. In Management Science, 56(1):71-89, January 2010.