Biography

Current Work

I am a Senior Technical Specialist at Economical Insurance in Waterloo, Ontario. I am a member of the Advanced Analytics team, which engages in research and development in support of a variety of business functions. Most of my work has involved building predictive models in support of claims operations and personal lines pricing, developing modelling methodologies and tools, and supporting commercial property insurance operations. Some of my current areas of research interest include:

• Territorial Modelling
• Applications of Operations Research models in an insurance context
• Clustering algorithms
• Credibility theory

I am a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society and an Associate of the Canadian Institute of Actuaries.

Other Interests

Some of my interests outside work include:

• Board games: some of my current favourites include 7 Wonders, London, Copycat, and Smallworld
• Politics: elsewhere on this site, you can see some of the data processing I've done on Canadian election results
• Video games: World of Warcraft, Dragon Age, and 16-bit RPGs
• Beer: I enjoy craft IPAs, and you can often find me reading at a local brewpub

Previous Work

Prior to working at Economical, I taught undergraduate mathematics at Wilfrid Laurier University. Courses I have taught include:

• Optimization (3rd year)
• Graph Theory (3rd year)
• Set Theory (2nd year)
• Probability and Statistics (2nd year)
• Introduction to Mathematical Proofs (1st year)

I did my graduate work in Combinatorics and Optimization from the University of Waterloo, under the supervision of Prof. David M. Jackson. My area of specialization was enumerative and algebraic combinatorics, and much of my work was on combinatorial applications of representation theory and differentials equations. You may download my thesis abstract and full theses via the links below:

• Doctoral thesis: Enumeration of Factorizations in the Symmetric Group: From Centrality to Non-centrality
• Doctoral Thesis Abstract
• Masters thesis: Enumeration of Walks on Generalized Differential Posets
• Masters Thesis Abstract

Published Articles

Jackson, D. M. and Sloss, C. A. Character-theoretic techniques for near-central enumerative problems. J. Combin. Theory Ser. A 119 (2012) 1665 -- 1679. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jcta.2012.0.004 (subscription required). The preprint is available at no cost at http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.4045.

Jackson, D. M. and Sloss, C. A. Near-central permutation factorization and Strahov's generalized Murnaghan-Nakayama rule. J. Combin. Theory Ser. A 119 (2012) 1856 -- 1874. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jcta.2012.06.006" (subscription required). The preprint is available at no cost at http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.4047.

Sloss, C. A. The Induced Subgraph Order on Unlabelled Graphs. Electron. J. Combin. Vol. 13. (2006) Download article

Submitted Articles

Jackson, D. M. and Sloss, C. A. A finite generating set for the genus g (p,q,n)-dipole series from perturbative Yang-Mills theory. Submitted. Available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.2806