Welcome speech, 10 August 2006 Louis G. Doray Universit� de Montr�al Bienvenue � Montr�al! Welcome to Montreal! Our hosts, the Centre de Recherches Math�matiques (CRM) and the Universit� de Montr�al are proud to welcome to the Actuarial Research Conference, 130 participants from 10 countries on 4 continents. CRM The CRM was founded in 1969 with the mandate to serve as a national centre for fundamental research in mathematics and its applications. Its scientific personnel includes close to 200 regular members, associate and visiting members and postdoctoral fellows. The CRM is mainly financed by the Universit� de Montr�al, FQRNT (le Fonds qu�b�cois de la recherche sur la nature et les technologies, Province of Qu�bec), and by NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada). Its university partners include McGill University, Universit� du Qu�bec � Montr�al, Concordia University, Universit� Laval, Universit� de Sherbrooke and University of Ottawa. In 1984, NSERC gave the status of national center to the CRM. The CRM's scientific activities fall into 2 categories: research projects undertaken by teams of researchers, many attached to the laboratories of the CRM, and thematic activities organized on a national or international level (in 2006/07, the subject is combinatorial optimization and combinatorics). In recent years, the CRM has developed a network of industrial collaborations through the Network for Computation and Mathematical Modelling and MITACS (Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems). I would like to thank the personnel from the CRM and especially Louis Pelletier; they handled all administrative work, registration, receipts, rooms, web pages. I would also like to thank the Society of Actuaries, and especially Sheree Baker, for the publicity and messages they sent, and CKER for the travel grants to students and the prizes for best talks. UNIVERSIT� DE MONTR�AL Our second host, the Universit� de Montr�al, was founded in 1878. With its two affiliated schools, �cole Polytechnique (the Engineering School) and H�C Montr�al (the Business School), it is now the largest university in Quebec and the second largest in Canada. With over 55,000 students from around the world, it awards close to 10,000 diplomas at every university level. With its international mission, the Universit� de Montr�al is one of the top universities in the French-speaking world. Actuarial science courses started to be offered by �cole des HEC (the business school) in 1933 to help French-Canadian students who wanted to write actuarial exams. The majority of Canadian actuaries were then English-speaking. In the Department of Mathematics, the first actuarial course was offered in the academic year 1952-53 by Herv� H�bert, who was among the first French-Canadian to become an FSA in 1957. He would later become a Chancellor of this University. (Elias will be happy to know that the first course offered was called "Finite differences with applications to physics and actuarial science".) The first full-time actuarial professor was hired in 1959 and later became vice-president of planning at the University. Since the late 1980's, actuarial professors at the University conduct teaching and research. The academic staff has now grown to 3 full-time actuarial professors. My colleagues in the Department who can also answer all your questions are Charles Dugas and Manuel Morales. PRESENTATIONS Charles is the one who will load your presentation on the PC. You should see him in the first 10 minutes of the break before the session where you will present. He will be helped by Vinal, a graduate student. There were a lot of talks submitted for presentations, so we could only allocate 15 to 18 minutes to each contributed talk. �5 minutes before the end of your talk, you will be shown a green sign, 2 minutes before the end, a yellow sign and when your time is up, a red stop sign (actually they are ARR�T signs in this part of the world). In some extreme situations, we might have to use another sign, a green sign for the audience (APPLAUD). Some speakers unfortunately could not make it to Montreal, so there were some last-minute changes to the programme. You can pick them up on the table at the entrance. EDUCATION As education is at the centre of our work, this Conference will start and end by talks on actuarial education. On Saturday afternoon, the Canadian Institute of Actuaries is organizing a Workshop on a new education system for Canada; you are all invited to attend it. But we will first hear what is being done at the international level for actuarial education by the International Actuarial Association. Our invited speaker, Mr Jean-Louis Mass� is a former President of the Canadian Institute of Actuaries and current President of the International Actuarial Association. After retiring as a practicing actuary from the Standard Life Assurance Company in Montreal, Mr Mass� went to the academic world, at UQAM.