Edan Saltz

“Edan Saltz, then a college junior, created a program for my NIH-funded animal cognition laboratory that would allow us to generate stimuli and record data. To my amazement, the program, which Edan called Rats-R-Us, is still being used 25 years later, in 72 Skinner boxes controlled by six ancient Apple //e’s. The program allows my technicians, students, and postdoctoral fellows to write code after about one hour of instruction. The system not only still does everything that we had wanted, but we found that it has emergent properties, and so it does some useful things that we had not imagined needing 25 years ago. Edan developed the system in a combination of BASIC and machine language. Machine language, though difficult to develop in, permits the system using 1970’s era technology to respond to the rats' behavior about as fast as would a modern computer running 3000 times faster but functionally slowed by Windows. We have published over 175 scientific papers based on data collected with the system and are still going strong. We are grateful to Edan for the work that he did for us so long ago.”

“While I was Treasurer at FSA, a financial guarantor, Moody’s released a new Monte Carlo simulation based risk model that produced a total capital requirement for the company. One responsibility of the Treasurer was monitoring rating agency capital requirements and understanding exactly how the rating agency models work. Edan’s initial charge was to develop a Monte Carlo model to duplicate Moody’s results. Since Moody’s results were 9 to 12 months out of date when released, Edan studied the Moody’s methodology to determine how Moody’s assigned loss severities and frequencies to individual risks and then applied the Moody’s severities and frequencies to new risks so that FSA could anticipate Moody’s capital requirements months ahead of actual release by Moody’s. Edan also created the capability to test the impact of potential transactions, reinsurance changes, policy restructurings and portfolio runoff on total required capital. Over several months of working together in dissecting the Moody’s model, Edan continually offered new approaches to analyzing the impact of data changes on model results. Through his efforts, our ultimate analytic abilities far exceeded that which we initially envisioned.”