The Institute is delighted to host Scott Farris as our special guest speaker today. Scott is Research Manager at the State Farm Research and Development Center, located on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He leads a team of two-dozen actuarial professionals and student interns who work on pricing and reserving models and research on new analytical methods. A veteran employee of nearly 30 years, Scott joined State Farm as an actuary. He then went on to help form the Statistical Analysis and Research Unit, which he managed for 14 years until 2003. The unit is credited with developing several pricing applications including major fire rating and analytic applications, new approaches to catastrophe ratemaking (a subject on which he has co-authored two papers), clustering with spatial analysis, and the use of large-scale database technologies. The unit’s SP2 database was one of the largest supercomputing sites in the world at the time it was deployed.
Scott moved to State Farm’s Systems group in 2003 where he worked in IT R&D on data warehouse and cost optimization solutions. His work included integrating hurricane simulation model results into IT optimization models to reduce infrastructure costs, and new forecasting approaches to IT cost optimization.
In July 2009, Scott returned to the Property & Casualty Actuarial department to assume his current position.