How MIT’s Muriel Medard Pioneered the Universal Decoder

Kathy Pretz | IEEE Spectrum
January 27, 2022

Network coding pioneer Muriel Médard calls herself a pathological optimist. The MIT electrical engineering and computer science professor’s positive thinking has led to new ways to improve tried-and-true techniques in the field of information theory.

As the head of the network coding group at the university’s Research Laboratory for Electronics, the IEEE Fellow led a team that created a silicon chip that eliminates the need for custom decoding hardware to spot signal errors. The chip uses a new algorithm the team developed with Ken Duffy from Maynooth University: guessing random additive noise decoding (GRAND). Duffy is a professor and the director of the school’s Hamilton Institute.