Ziv Goldfeld

Associate Professor

School of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Cornell University

Associate Professor Cornell ECE Cornell University

I am an Associate Professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a graduate field member of Computer Science, Statistics and Data Science, Operations Research and Information Engineering, and the Center of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. I am a mentor at the AI + Math Lab at Cornell and a member of the Foundations of Information, Networks, and Decision Systems (FIND) group.

Prior to joining Cornell, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at MIT. Before that, I received my B.Sc., M.Sc. (both summa cum laude) and Ph.D. in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Research Interests

I study the mathematical and algorithmic foundations of machine learning and AI, drawing on optimal transport, information theory, statistics, and optimization. My current interests include:

Optimal transport theory and the Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) problem: Geometry, statistics, algorithms, and alignment of heterogeneous data.
AI mechanistic interpretability, safety, and alignment: Principled approaches for causal abstractions, information-flow analysis, and steering of neural networks, especially LLMs.
Information theory (including quantum information theory): Learning, privacy, security, and information-theoretic foundations of modern AI.
Robust statistics and decision-making: Inference and learning under local (perturbations) and global (outliers) data contamination.

My research has been supported by the NSF CAREER Award, an NSF DMS Grant, an NSF-BSF CIF Grant, and the IBM University Award.

My project, “Geometry-aware alignment for mathematical statement auto-formalization,” was selected for funding through the AI-for-Math seed grant program at Renaissance Philanthropy in October 2026.

Students and Postdocs

Alumni:
Gabriel Rioux (Assistant Professor of Statistics, Purdue University)
Haiyun He (Assistant Professor, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Guangzhou)
Sloan Nietert (Postdoc at EPFL)
Sreejith Sreekumar (Assistant Professor, Centralesupelec, University Paris-Saclay)
Theshani Nuradha (J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Zhengxin Zhang (Quantitative finance researcher at Xantium)

Due to the volume of email I receive, I may not be able to respond to unsolicited inquiries about openings or research advice. If your interests strongly align with mine and you have a strong quantitative background, feel free to contact me.