Industrial Projects

1997-98 Projects

Sponsor: Harvard Medical School and Center for Radiation Therapy
Advisor: Prof. Ming Chen
Student: Julie Fondurulia (Master of Applied Statistics)

This goal of this project is to develop statistical methods to determine important prognostic factors in studies of Prostate-Specific Antigen failures.

ODE Toolkit

Sponsor: Digital Equipment Corporation
Advisor: Prof. Joseph Fehribach
Co-Advisor: Prof. William Farr
Students: R. Demar, A. Howes, and A. Palombizio (MQP)

This is a joint project with Harvey-Mudd to develop the package ODE Toolkit as a Web-Based ODE solver.

Mathieu Functions for Macsyma

Sponsor: Macsyma, Inc.
Advisor: Prof. Joseph Fehribach
Students: B. Altieri and M. Vadeboncoeur (MQP)

This project will help Macsyma develop several routines for their product Macsyma, including a numerical evaluation package for the Mathieu's function.

Mathematical Software Usability Testing

Sponsor: Macsyma, Inc., Waterloo MAPLE, and Softwarehouse (Derive)
Advisor: Prof. Joseph Fehribach
Students: K. Lee and A. Rua (IQP)

This project compares the ease of use between the mathematical software Macsyma, Derive, and Maple for precalculus and early calculus high school students.

Exploring Optimal Cession Strategies for Automobile Insurance

Sponsor: Premier
Advisor: Prof. Art Heinricher
Students: T. Adams and D. Deacon (MQP)

This project is studying dynamic optimization strategies that can be used by Premier Insurance of Massachusetts to make cession decisions. This will build on previous work and provide the company with a tool to compare the results from different strategies as well as determine how the strategy and the payoff changes with changes in the model parameters, especially changes in the state's total deficit and cession strategies used by the rest of the insurance industry.

Simulation of the Behavior of Variable Life Insurance

Sponsor: John Hancock
Advisor: Prof. Ann Wiedie
Students: D. Sickman (MQP)

Development of a probabilistic (rather than deterministic as used before by the company) approach to simulate the effect of stock market volatility on the behavior of a variable life insurance policy. This approach was applied to project the activity hypothetical policies, intended to achieve a given account value (the death benefit), at various premium amounts. Distributions of the minimum number of required premium payments, the account value in a given year, and the year in which the policy was fully funded were approximated via simulation.

Differences in Patient Treatment Across Types of Health Plans

Sponsor: Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts
Advisor: Prof. Ann Wiedie
Students: D. Atkinson, L. Bottos, and A. Capek

Differences between managed care and indemnity health care plans have been a topic of recent debate. Claims resulting from the treatment of members diagnosed with asthma and/or arthritis were analyzed to compare the treatment of the same condition by the same provider across the two types of health plans. Analysis was performed for facility and for non-facility providers as trends were different in each case. Specifically, tests were performed to determine significant differences between types of plan in the mean cost per patient. Also, the types of procedures performed on patients in each type of plan were analyzed, and differences in the distributions of procedures (across and within types of procedures) were tested for significance. The age and gender distributions of the members, for whom claims were filed, were explored across and within the two types of plans.

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Last modified: Jun 20, 2010, 13:03 UTC