Tools for testing the Solvency Capital Requirement for life insurance

Longevity risk is one of the major risks that an insurance company or a pension fund has to deal with and it is expected that its importance will grow in the near future. In agreement with these considerations, in Solvency II regulation the Standard formula furnished for calculating the Solvency Capital Requirement explicitly considers this kind of risk. According to the new European rules in our paper we suggest a multiperiod approach to evaluate the SCR for longevity risk. We propose a backtesting framework for measuring the consistency of SCR calculations for life insurance policies.

Research progress on reuse of fluid catalytic cracking waste from oil refinery in cement-based materials

Present paper present the main results obtained in the scope of an ongoing project which aims to contribute to the valorization of a waste generated by the Portuguese oil company in construction materials. This waste is an aluminosilicate with high pozzolanic reactivity. Several different technological applications had already been tested with success both in terms of properties and compliance with the corresponding standards specifications. Namely, this project results already demonstrated that this waste can be used in traditional concrete, self-compacted concrete, mortars (renders, masonry mortar, concrete repair mortars), cement main constituent as well as alkali activated binders.

Vertex component analysis GPU-based implementation for hyperspectral unmixing

Endmember extraction (EE) is a fundamental and crucial task in hyperspectral unmixing. Among other methods vertex component analysis ( VCA) has become a very popular and useful tool to unmix hyperspectral data. VCA is a geometrical based method that extracts endmember signatures from large hyperspectral datasets without the use of any a priori knowledge about the constituent spectra. Many Hyperspectral imagery applications require a response in real time or near-real time. Thus, to met this requirement this paper proposes a parallel implementation of VCA developed for graphics processing units. The impact on the complexity and on the accuracy of the proposed parallel implementation of VCA is examined using both simulated and real hyperspectral datasets.