James Ryan
Principal at Sifty
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJames Ryan is a Principal software engineer and founder with over a decade building AI-driven storytelling systems for games and media, currently shipping Viv—an emergent narrative engine—via his studio Sifty. He holds a PhD in Computational Media from UC Santa Cruz where he introduced "story sifting," and has led interdisciplinary teams combining symbolic AI and LLMs to create author-centric conversation and story engines. A full-stack engineer fluent in Python and TypeScript, he designs both runtime systems and accessible authoring tools (including domain-specific languages) that let nontechnical creators shape behavior. His background spans research labs, academia, and industry—teaching courses in NLP and programming languages while shipping production AI products. Notably, he built an end-to-end AI engine and monitoring stack as a sole developer at mPath AI Coaching, demonstrating both product delivery and operational ownership. Based in Minneapolis, he blends rigorous research insight with practical engineering to advance narrative AI for entertainment.
12 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MS), Health Informatics, Master of Science (MS), Health Informatics at University of MinnesotaUniversity of California Santa CruzAssociate of Arts (AA), Liberal Arts, Associate of Arts (AA), Liberal Arts at Normandale Community College
Github Skills (19)
text-generation10
simulation10
question-answering5
procedural-generation5
dsl5
text-classification4
game-development4
conversational-ai3
natural-language-processing3
ai3
named-entity-recognition3
programming-language3
transformers3
multimodal3
natural-language-generation3
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
james-owen-ryan/bad_news_live
Sep 2015 - Feb 2019
Contributions:134 commits, 129 pushes, 2 branches in 3 years 6 months
james-owen-ryan/national_pastime
Aug 2014 - Apr 2016
Contributions:46 commits, 24 pushes in 1 year 8 months
sportsbaseball
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