VORtech Blog

In our practice as scientific software engineers at VORtech, we work for organizations that have computational software as an essential part of their intellectual capital. If successful, a computational software package can exist for many years and even decades. At the same time however, the code base grows and becomes more and more difficult to manage. This is part 2 of a series of blogs in which we discuss how to deal with legacy code.

In our practice as scientific software engineers at VORtech, we work for organizations that have computational software as an essential part of their intellectual capital. If successful, a computational software package can exist for many years and even decades. At the same time however, the code base grows and becomes more and more difficult to manage. This is part 1 of a series of blogs in which we discuss how to deal with legacy code.

Digital twins are the hype of the moment in automation. But the concept is rather ambiguous: people refer to it in many different ways. To bring some order in this confusion, I tried to find a classification of digital twins. It turns out that a single classification is not enough.

At VORtech we mostly work on extending and improving existing code. Let us explain why this is so important and how it works. 

The FailurePredictor is a concept to make electricity grids more robust and reliable using a combination of expert experience and machine learning.

Digital twins are the hype of the day in industrial technology. Software companies are quick to jump on the band wagon, launching products that fulfil at least part of the functionality that is associated with digital twins. But where is the open source platform that allows collaboration on the development of this concept? The current open source initiatives don't seem to live up to the needs. An initiative on European level would be welcome.

Burn injuries can have a radical impact on someone’s quality of life. A burn injury in the neck, for example, can cause a contraction that makes it impossible for someone to lift his or her head. Complications such as hypertrophic scars and contractions can occur as the result of burn injuries. In the first-place, hypertrophic scars cause aesthetic problems. In the case of hypertrophy, the scar is thicker and more elevated than normal. The second class of complications, an excessive contraction, often causes reduced mobility of the joint of the patient.

Automatic trading, portfolio optimization, and insurance valuation were the topics of the first part of this blog. In this second part, we will further discuss the added value of technical experts in finance. We do this by looking at how credit data can be managed at banks, how algorithms can help to prevent future credit crises, and how data science can provide insights into mortgage loans. These three financial topics are very different at first glance. But they have some common parts: they benefit from a technical engineering solution, through mathematical techniques and scientific software.

In recent years, we were fortunate to work on many different data-science projects for our customers. But from experience I know that the most important success factor of such a pilot project is not in using the most advanced algorithm, but instead, how the project is designed.

Since the credit crisis, banks and insurers have become a lot more cautious. This can be seen from the financial models that are used: they are getting increasingly more ingenious and complex, partly due to new insights and stricter regulations. Risks of products are better assessed, more advanced investment strategies are implemented and more aspects are included in order to assess the financial market more realistically. The tendency is that more and more highly skilled engineers are hired to support this complex matter. These technical experts prove their value in finance. In this blog, we will go into this further based on a number of relevant finance projects that have been carried out at VORtech,.