Ziv was dean of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering from 1974 to 1976 and vice president for Academic Affairs from 1978 to 1982.[2] From 1987, Ziv had spent three sabbatical leaves at the Information Research Department of Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.[3]
From 1955 to 1959, he served as a senior research engineer for the Scientific Department of the Israel Ministry of Defense, focused on research and development of communication systems.[2] While studying for his doctorate at M.I.T. from 1961 to 1962, he joined the Applied Science Division of Melpar, Inc. in Watertown, Massachusetts, where he was a senior research engineer performing research in communication theory.[2] In 1962 he returned to the Israel Ministry of Defense's scientific department, as head of the Communications Division and was also a contributor to the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.[2] From 1968 to 1970 he was one of the technical staff members of Bell Laboratories, Inc., and, from 1985 to 1991, was the chairman of the Israeli Universities Planning and Grants Committee.[3] He was also a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities from 1981 to his death, and he served as its president between 1995 and 2004.[3]
In 1993, Ziv was awarded the Israel Prize, for exact sciences.[6] Ziv received in 1995 the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, for "contributions to information theory, and the theory and practice of data compression",[7] and in 1998 a Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the IEEE Information Theory Society.[8]
