Amir is a DPhil student in Law at Wolfson College and Oxford Faculty of Law. He was born in Tehran, and did his undergraduate studies at the Sharif University of Technology in electrical engineering and minored in the philosophy of science. He also took some courses in economics during his studies at Sharif. He changed his major from engineering to law and did his master’s at Shahid Beheshti University in International Law with his thesis titled “Computational Analysis of the Sources of International Law.”

In Iran, he participated in several research projects, including but not limited to preparing the draft of the Iranian Personal Data Protection Act, giving numerous workshops on topics such as the EU proposal on Artificial Intelligence, and working with Iranian digital industry stakeholders.

His DPhil dissertation at Oxford under the supervision of Professor Justine Pila concerns the regulation of Artificial Intelligence and digital platforms, mostly by examining the role of “gatekeepers” of the digital economy. What intrigues him the most is power, from our day-to-day encounters with its social forms within our daily interactions with others to its more abstract institutional forms. This power might have been vested in the hands of political and government establishments, hopefully in a democratic way with mechanisms designed to limit and control its aggregation, or in a non-democratic way, as is the case for the giant multi-national tech companies.

He believes a new leviathan has emerged within the infosphere that even the once-almighty traditional state leviathans depend on. That’s, he believes, where the rule of law comes into play. Any illegitimate power, exercised or not, has to be restrained through the means of law for the benefit of the people, and the gatekeepers are not an exception. Thus, the real-life problem he wants to tackle is putting a leash on these gatekeepers while allowing for the development of new technologies that might bring a better, more prosperous future for humankind and not infringe on the legitimate rights of these private-sector entities.