Student Spotlight: Dani Vilardell
October 5, 2026
Dani Vilardell is a doctoral student in computer science from Barcelona, Spain. He earned his bachelor’s in mathematics and electrical engineering at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and now studies the tension between privacy and transparency in widely used technologies under the guidance of Ari Juels at Cornell.
What is your area of research and why is it important?
My research has studied the inherent tension between privacy and transparency in widely used technologies such as AI, blockchain, and governance systems. Many systems benefit from both: Elections rely on privacy to protect voters from coercion, yet must be publicly verifiable to be trusted; AI can reason over someone’s private data, yet its judgments should be auditable; blockchains need confidentiality, yet still must be transparent enough to enable compliance. I build systems that find the right balance between the two notions. Recently, I’ve been interested in another tension: the autonomy of AI agents versus our ability to control them.
What are the larger implications of this research?
As society relies more on technologies that process sensitive personal data, it becomes essential to reduce how much we must trust the companies developing and deploying them. Privacy is a fundamental right in many places, and it deserves to be upheld in a way that is auditable and transparent. My research provides the tools to build such systems and studies the security guarantees they offer once deployed. My lab works closely with industry collaborators to bring this work to production, so our research ends not when a paper is accepted into a conference, but when the technology is used.
What does it mean to you to have been selected for the Ethereum Foundation Ph.D. Fellowship?
Receiving this award is a great recognition of the work I’ve put into my doctoral studies here at Cornell, and a sign that there is a whole community of people who value it. But I see it as much more than an individual honor. The research it recognizes came out of bouncing ideas with my labmates, my collaborators, and my advisor, who have shaped both the questions I work on and the way I approach them. This award is theirs as much as mine.
What will this allow you to do that you might not have been able to otherwise?
This fellowship will help me pursue the study of unstoppable autonomous agents: AI-based malware that can pursue open-ended goals and adaptively evade detection tools. Malware has historically been built around fixed goals, like recruiting machines into a botnet, encrypting a filesystem for ransomware, or exfiltrating credentials. What’s different about an AI agent is that you can specify an open-ended goal instead of hardcoding the steps, letting it figure out the execution and making many existing detection tools obsolete. As an EF fellow, I can work directly with the foundation and the wider ecosystem, helping the systems we develop reach production.
What are your hobbies or interests outside of your research or scholarship?
I try to keep myself busy! I love spending time with friends and making the most of everything NYC has to offer. I also love doing sports, running and swimming among them. Earlier this summer I picked up salsa dancing, and I’ve been enjoying it a lot. And on top of all that, I play the piano, which is where I find my peace of mind after busy work days.
Why did you choose Cornell to pursue your degree?
Many reasons. First, my advisor, Ari Juels, felt like a great fit from the start, both in research interests and in working style, and that has turned out to be exactly the case. Second, being based in New York City lets me explore my interests well beyond work and even collaborate with peers at other universities such as NYU. And finally, I chose Cornell Tech because its focus on industry impact matched how I wanted to work: on research that ends up deployed and used rather than staying purely theoretical.