CORMSIS Seminar by Lyn Thomas Event
- Time:
- 16:00 - 17:00
- Date:
- 30 April 2015
- Venue:
- 02/3043
For more information regarding this event, please telephone Tri-Dung Nguyen on 02380595997 or email T.D.Nguyen@soton.ac.uk .
Event details
Credit where credit is due: Lessons for O.R. Modelling from the Global Financial Crisis
Abstract:
Yet credit scoring together with the models used by rating agencies to assess the default risk of portfolios of consumer loans are highlighted in the debate on the causes of the subprime mortgage crash and the subsequent global financial crisis. Identifying the performance of these models during this period leads to a number of lessons which are relevant to Operations Research modelling in many areas. These include whether models should be publically available and the need to recognise when the objectives of the model are no longer in line with those of the real problem.
Speaker information
Lyn C Thomas, Lyn Thomas is Professor of Management Science at the University of Southampton, having previously held academic posts at the Universities of Manchester and Edinburgh in the UK and the Naval Postgraduate School in the US. . His research interests are in applying Operational Research, game theoretical and statistical ideas and techniques to sequential decision problems, in inventory, replacement, queuing and search theory. Although for the past few years this has focussed on problems in banking and consumer credit he has also worked on defence related problems including ASW search problems and logistic problems such as replacement, maintenance and inventory in both deployment and procurement contexts. Some of these have been supported by grants from DERA (as was) and dstl. He was a member of the Defence Scientific Advisory Committee Operational Analysis Panel and on the DSAC working group on the use of scientific developments in future logistics. Lyn Thomas has published more than 200 research papers, the vast majority in refereed journals. He has been awarded the Goodeve Medal of the Operational Research Society twice, in 1999 and 2010, for papers adjudged to be the best paper that year in the Journal of the Operational Research Society, In 2008 he was awarded that Society’s Beale Medal for his sustained contribution to the subject of Operational Research. He has been awarded research grants approaching £2,000,000 and has supervised to completion 24 Ph.D. students. Lyn Thomas has been a plenary speaker at international conferences on five continents and was the chairman of IFORS 2002 the largest Operational Research conference ever held in the UK. His talk today was the plenary one he gave as the IFORS Visiting Lecturer at the 2014 INFORMS conference. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of Operational Research, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and a Past President of the UK Operational Research Society.