Prior to joining Tel Aviv University, he was a faculty member at the Hebrew University for seven years. Amir holds a PhD in computational neuroscience from the Hebrew University, and was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT and the University of Toronto. His research interests include machine learning, graphical models, convex optimization, neural computation and natural language processing. He is an action editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research, and the Associate Editor in Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. His work has received several prizes including five paper awards (two at NIPS, two at UAI, and one at ICML), as well as one runner up for best paper at ICML. His work has been supported by several grants and awards from ISF, BSF, GIF, Intel, HP, and Google. In 2015 he was visiting faculty at Google Mountain View.