James Heldridge
Building at the intersection of AI and design.
Overview
Applied AI Engineer @NCITE
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About
- AI + Design Engineer building intelligent systems at the intersection of applied AI and human-centered design.
- Currently an Applied AI Engineer at NCITE (DHS Center of Excellence), developing multi-agent systems for threat assessment using LangChain, LangGraph, and Claude API.
- Pursuing an MS in Human Centered Computing at the University of Nebraska, researching how people interact with AI-driven tools.
- Previously AV & IT Lead Tech at Baxter Arena, where I built audio automation pipelines, programmed DSP systems, and managed live event technology for a 7,800-seat venue.
- Skilled in Python, TypeScript, React, Next.js, FastAPI, LangChain, and Figma.
- BS in Music Technology (cum laude) from the University of Nebraska.
GitHub Contributions
Stack
Research(2)
Published at HICSS 2026. A systematic review of 38 peer-reviewed studies examining AI integration throughout the assessment lifecycle across critical infrastructure, finding that government facilities and healthcare settings accounted for more than 70% of all documented use cases.
MS thesis in Human Centered Computing. Applies Design Science Research to build a RAG-based AI expert system that scaffolds non-expert school administrators through security risk assessments, grounded in Task-Technology Fit theory.
Experience
- Designing and deploying multi-agent systems for automated threat assessment using LangChain, LangGraph, and Claude API.
- Building internal tools with React, Next.js, and FastAPI to support analyst workflows.
- Developing NLP pipelines for processing and classifying unstructured text data.
- Collaborating with researchers on human-centered AI interfaces for national security applications.
- LangChain
- LangGraph
- Claude API
- React
- Next.js
- Python
- FastAPI
- NLP
- C
- DSP
- Signal Processing
- Systems Programming
- Audio Engineering
- IT Infrastructure
Education
- Human-Computer Interaction
- AI/ML
- UX Research
- Python
- Research Methods
- Audio Engineering
- DSP
- C
- Python
- Creative Computing
Projects(2)
A nationwide K-12 risk assessment platform at DHS's National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE), part of a $35M federally funded research initiative. I lead design direction and oversee the full UX process — from user research and prototyping to system implementation — collaborating with researchers to translate research into a scalable design system that advances school safety across the United States.
- Product Design
- UX Research
- Design Systems
- Figma
- React
- Human-Centered AI
An agentic system that autonomously crawls and analyzes web content for risk indicators using local LLMs. Built with LangChain for orchestration and Python for data processing, enabling automated threat assessment without reliance on external API calls.
- Python
- LangChain
- Local LLM
- Web Scraping
- NLP
- Risk Analysis