Paul Beard

I am a life actuary with 13 years of experience in the industry, having worked at Royal London, Phoenix Group, SCOR, and (currently) Pacific Life Re.

I’m a strong advocate for open-source software, both its philosophy and capability. I have had the opportunity to contribute to several projects this year. In February, I completed the development of SCOR’s annuity pricing model in R. In November, I co-authored the IBLM (Interpretable Boosted Linear Models) R package as part of the IFoA Data Science Working Party. With 2025 being the Year of the Snake, I also took to learning Python, and collaborated on an A.I. tech start-up that simulates an English speaking exam.

I spend a lot of my time these days thinking about artificial intelligence, cycling through states of optimism, scepticism and outright fear at the future prospects. I am also co-chair of the IFoA’s Life A.I. and Automation Working Party, during which I try to suppress the latter state as much as possible

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