Highlights

• CSA principals Professor Michael Dempster and Dr Elena Medova regularly present CSA's innovative ideas by invitation at international events. Most recently they presented papers at the Royal Society of Edinburgh "Computation in Finance and Insurance, post Napier" and the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences "Systemic Risk"

• Professor Dempster has been honoured by election to a foreign membership of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the Italian Academy founded in 1603 by Federico Cesi. He was inducted into the Academy in a ceremony in the Corsini Palace in Rome in November 2013

• CSA is a participant, along with a number of leading companies and EU universities (see here) in a 4-year International Training Network funded by the EU "Marie-Curie" initiative to advance high performance computing in finance. CSA's contribution will develop its Stochastics™ and iALM™ technologies for use in the EU. Professor Dempster was the first chairman of the Supervisory Board of the project

• Together with Scottish Widows Investment Partnership, CSA organized the highly successful mid-term review conference of the ITN project, New Thinking in Finance in the City of London in February 2014

• CSA's UK Individual Asset Liability Management iALM™ household life cycle financial planning system is available for evaluation. Please contact us at admin@cambridge-systems.com or on +44 1223 557640 to arrange a demonstration of the US or UK versions of iALM™

• Professor Dempster took part in a widely distributed discussion on Voice of Russia about raising the retirement age in which he advocated the view that official retirement age must follow increasing longevity and medical advances and noted that lifelong financial planning tools such as iALM™ can help individuals understand the consequences of this policy

• Stochastic Optimization Methods in Finance and Energy, edited by Professors Bertocchi, Consigli and Dempster, is published by Springer. The book presents a collection of contributions dedicated to applied problems in the financial and energy sectors that have been formulated and solved in a stochastic optimization framework. The chapters authored by CSA personnel contain recent applications of Stochastics™ technology. See also Quantitative Fund Management, edited by Professors Dempster, Mitra and Pflug and published by Chapman & Hall CRC

• Commodities, edited by Professor Dempster and Professor K Tang of Renmin University of China, will be published in 2015 by Chapman&Hall/CRC. The introduction and 31 contributions to the volume represent current thinking about commodity and energy markets and their relationship to other financial markets and global current issues such as pollution control

• A 2011 German High Court decision has boosted CSA's independent over-the-counter structured derivative valuation business in Germany, Italy and the UK. CSA has valued an Italian local authority structured swap for Bloomberg News and has collaborated with them in their exosure of the loss hiding nature of the long maturity derivative deals between Monte di Paschi dei Sienna, the worlds' oldest bank founded in 1482, and two global investment banks

• CSA principals have been giving joint webinars sponsored by our partner IBM presenting to a wider UK and US audience CSA's commercial experience in applying optimization to practical fund management. CSA is currently cooperating with IBM's CPLEX optimization development by contributing large scale practical asset liability management problems to IBM research

• Professor Dempster, Professor Jagjit Chadha and Derry Pickford have published a pamphlet with Searching Finance entitled The Euro in Danger: Reform and Reset which has been widely discussed in EU and UK government committees as providing steps toward a stable eurozone

• A paper by Professors Dempster, Evstigneev and Schenk-Hoppé on growing wealth with fixed-mix portfolio rebalancing strategies has attracted much attention as the definitive summary of their earlier theoretical work. It appears as Chapter 29 in a book on the Kelly Capital Growth Investment Criterion edited by Professors MacLean and Ziemba and E O Thorp and published by World Scientific