24 September 1999 Ken LaToza ('75)

I am currently a software architecture for an insurance company that specializes in natural disasters. I write software, plan or architect this software, and direct others in writing parts of the software (I currently have about 7 people reporting directly or indirectly to me.) This particular software determines the insurance loss incurred by either hurricanes or earthquakes on insurable assets. The insurance, hazard and damage calculations all involve both higher mathematics and engineering knowledge. My title is Principal Software Engineer and I report to the CIO of this organization. Most of the employees are either engineers or scientists.

My education included a year of Physics and Applied Mathematics at NCSU in Raleigh, NC. and 2 years in Mathematics and Engineering Science at Northwestern University where I received my MS.

In my current work we are trying to determine the physical size of the data produced by running our model and the time it takes to run the problem on useful data sets. [As an aside we are modeling hundreds of thousands of physical assets, with multiple insurance policies and on thousands of hurricanes or earthquakes. Even on moderate size computing equipment these problems can run for weeks and consume 100's of gigabytes of data storage]. Part of the intellectual activity has been to reduce both of these aspects (i.e. size and running time) of these problems to more manageable size and to extrapolate actual run times from the physical parameters of the input problem. This activity required building models (fairly simple ones) that generated the estimates of the sizes of the resultant data sets and model run times. I have also been involved with methods for contracting the problem to a more manageable size by aggregating the underlying assets.

At the Ford Motor Company I modeled engine vibration (Langrangian mechanics) and a full car system for fuel economy and performance evaluation among other modeling problems. At O'Connor and Associates (now part of Swiss Bank) I worked on modeling the stock prices fluctuation. From a modeling perspective this is very much a physics problem (thermodynamic heat equation with complicated boundary conditions.) . Most of the employees at this firm in this department were either physicists or mathematicians.

Ken