NAME
Harsh Deep (he/him)
SYNOPSIS
Education:
B.S. in Computer Science and Statistics at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC) [2018-2022]
IB Diploma Program at The International School Bangalore (TISB) [2016-2018]
ICSE at Greenwood High School [2005-2016]
Industry:
Modern Treasury [Software Engineer III][2026-] - Team: Banks Send
Modern Treasury [Software Engineer II][2024-2026] - Team: Payment Rails and later Banks Send - Worked on global payments and systemic improvements to scale payment integrations
Modern Treasury [Software Engineer I][2022-2024] - Team: Payment Rails - Focused on low-cost global payments to APAC and EMEA
University of Illinois [Mix of Research and Course Assistant Roles][2018-2022]
Treniq [Intern][Summer 2017] - Worked on data ingestion and web bot automation for use cases in the high-end furniture industry
imr.sv Media Group [Intern][2017] - Worked on a cool portfolio site of interesting 360-degree interactive photos, videos, and apartment tours.
Research:
UIUC Universal Design for Learning Group [Writing Code And Field Testing][2020-2022]
UIUC HCI Group under Alex Kirlik [Experiment Design, Writing Papers, Visualizing Complex Data, and Running User Studies][2019-2022]
DESCRIPTION
har.sh likes full stack web development, human computer interaction, automating banking, teaching programming, distributed systems, and making work available to the public through both code and writing.
NEWS
[August, 2025]
I wrote my first technical post on my company’s Engineering Blog, which I now run: Floats Don’t Work For Storing Cents: Why Modern Treasury Uses Integers Instead
[March, 2025]
I got to come back to UIUC to judge at HackIllinois 2025. I saw lots of cool projects and a shark-tank-like final-round presentation competition.
RESEARCH
PUBLICATIONS
Validating Trust in Human-Robot Interaction Through Virtual Reality: Comparing Embodied and “Behind-the-Screen” Interactions, S Rodriguez, H Deep, D Asher, J Schaffer, A Kirlik [2023]
Tried having participants vary based on doing a virtual warehouse task with 2D screens or VR to see if a robot assistant was trusted more. With 119 participants, the VR environments did lead to more trusting behavior.
What’s This? A Voice and Touch Multimodal Approach for Ambiguity Resolution in Voice Assistants, Jaewook Lee, Sebastian S Rodriguez, Raahul Natarrajan, Jacqueline Chen, Harsh Deep, Alex Kirlik [2021]
We had a voice assistant where a participant could point their phone at a set of items and ask things like “Find me a recipe that includes these” or “How do I assemble this?” The phone context was passed to the AI. Users generally liked it based on the NASA-TLX scale and preferred it over not having the feature in the study.
Measuring complacency in humans interacting with autonomous agents in a multi-agent system, SS Rodriguez, J Chen, H Deep, JJ Lee, DE Asher, E Zaroukian [2020]
We created a group tag game where humans team up with AI to chase another AI. We varied how good the AI were to see if humans would get more complacent if the AI was really good. There was a lot of fun measurement with eye tracking to see focus, task load, and trust in automation.
PROJECTS
OPEN SOURCE
StompJS --github_link=stomp-js/stompjs
StompJS is a library that lets browsers and other JS environments talk to AMQP Queues like RabbitMQ using STOMP. I added exponential backoff for connection issues, and wrote reference implementations in React and Svelte. (250k weekly downloads)
ClassTranscribe --github_link=ClassTranscribe
ClassTranscribe is an accessibility-focused video website for educational lectures. I added support for live streams, modernized to a recent Node version after a lot of pain, and added the first test cases to the project.
(Used by thousands of students across several universities)
PERSONAL
UIUC Course Explorer++ --github_link=harsh183/uiuc-course-explorer-plus-plus/
A browser extension that improves the UIUC Course Explorer website by allowing direct jumps to course pages, Google Maps links for campus locations, and links to GPA statistics and Reddit discussion about classes.
Fibonacci Array --github_link=harsh183/fibArray.rb
An experimental data structure that uses Fibonacci numbers like 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 to access list elements instead of typical index numbers like 0, 1, 2, 3.
Simple Kotlin Scoring Test Framework --github_link=harsh183/hackyTestWithScores.kt
A simple hacky test framework that creates a DSL for writing test cases with custom weights for scoring. The goal was to have a single file with no imports or frameworks required to run in a fast Kotlin environment. It became the basis of Kotlin grading in the open-source homework platform KTeach, developed by Davis Keene
Fancy Git Client --github_link=harsh183/fgit
A sleek command-line git client with interactive menus, colors, status sliders, and nicer displays for single-command add/commit/push flows.
TEACHING
I’ve spent multiple semesters in pivotal roles teaching various introductory computer science resources at UIUC, like:
- CS 125 - Introduction to Computer Science (Java)
- CS 199: IKP - Intro to Kotlin Programming (Kotlin)
- CS 199: EMP - Even More Practice (Java)
- CS 225 - Introduction to Data Structures and Algorithms with C++
- CS 277 - Algorithms and Data Structures for Data Science (Python)
- Summer of Side Projects - In Summer 2021 and 2022, I led a series of workshops and guided projects in Python and JavaScript, with 65+ projects by 40+ participants. (Python, JavaScript)
EXTRAS
Pictured: Me, explaining to the ‘puter why my code should work