How the FCC Uses Mathematical Optimization

Webinar Recording

Watch this short webinar to learn about how the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) uses mathematical optimization to schedule the reassignment of channels for broadcast television stations in the United States and Canada in order to free up spectrum for mobile use and 5G.

Webinar Summary

In this webinar, you will discover how the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) uses mathematical optimization to schedule the reassignment of channels for broadcast television stations in the United States and Canada in order to free up spectrum for mobile use and 5G.

In the webinar, you will learn:

How the FCC modeled their scheduling problem and attained buy-in for their approach
Some of the unique challenges faced when using mathematical optimization to determine public policy

Presenters

The presenters of this webinar will be Dr. Karla Hoffman and Brian Smith.

Dr. Karla Hoffman from the Federal Communications Commission

Dr. Karla Hoffman is a professor at George Mason University in the Systems Engineering and Operations Research Department. Her primary areas of research are combinatorial optimization and auctions. She has consulted to the FCC for many years on analytics, optimization, auction design and auction testing. She is Past President and a Fellow of INFORMS

Brian Smith from the Federal Communications Commission

Brian Smith is an Operations Research Analyst with NCI Information Systems, Inc. and project manager for the Optimization Team at the FCC. He has an MS in Operations Research from George Mason University and a BS in Mathematics from the Catholic University of America.

Presented Materials

You can download the slides presented in this webinar here.