Harris Nisar
PhD Candidate, Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering · UIUC
Data Scientist · John Deere
I am a PhD Candidate in Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and a Part-Time Data Scientist at John Deere. My research spans human-computer interaction, extended reality (XR), and applied machine learning, with a focus on building tools that help people learn and make better decisions.
Advised by Prof. Dušan M. Stipanović (ISE, UIUC). During my time at the Healthcare Engineering Systems Center (HCESC), I had the pleasure of collaborating with Prof. James M. Rehg and Prof. Thenkurussi “Kesh” Kesavadas.
News
Education
Experience
Deere
- Led multi-disciplinary teams to develop virtual reality (VR) simulations for medical education and surgical training.
- Managed end-to-end project lifecycles: ideation, proposal writing, and software production.
- Administered $100,000+ in Jump Trading ARCHES funding.
- Collaborated with Prof. James M. Rehg and Prof. Thenkurussi “Kesh” Kesavadas on research initiatives.
Publications & Projects
We propose DiffEye, a diffusion-based generative model for creating realistic, raw eye-tracking trajectories conditioned on natural images, which outperforms existing methods on scanpath generation tasks.
Presented at IEEE Virtual Reality, Osaka, Japan, March 25–27, 2019. Evaluated the effectiveness of an interactive mixed reality application for teaching sepsis prevention.
Validation study for a VR-based food safety training module, assessing fidelity and content coverage for educational effectiveness.
A suite of VR training applications built in Unity3D for the Oculus Quest 2, covering: Joviality (psychotherapy for terminal illness), Neonatal UVC training, ECMO procedure teaching, Spay VR (veterinary surgery), Brain VR (neuroanatomy), and Road to Birth (obstetrics). All projects involve end-to-end development from SME consultation to deployment.