Joel Branch

Joel Branch is the Chief Product Officer at Lucd. Prior to Lucd, Joel was with BOSS AI and ESPN Advanced Technology Group.

At ESPN, Joel led a newly-formed data analytics team. The team was responsible for developing technological solutions for media analytics and end-user engagement across various applications. The team also developed relationships with other ESPN business units for establishing strategic alignment and technology transfer opportunities.

Under Joel's leadership, the team developed an end-to-end social media analytics platform. The platform included a lambda architecture based big data ingest/access, statistical analysis techniques for predicting viral social media, and ML-based document similarity and categorization for competitive social media analysis. The platform was deployed for an internal pilot with the ESPN social media group.

In addition to the social media analytics platform, Joel and their team also developed automated semantic video indexing technologies using image recognition, object detection, and spoken word distribution analysis. This demonstrated efficiency gains in searching and distributing sports content. Lastly, they developed implicit news recommendation capabilities using collaborative and information filtering techniques (using Apache Spark), which also helped identify requirements in updating ESPN data management platforms for supporting responsive recommendation capabilities.

Joel Branch received their Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and their B.S. in Computer Science from Howard University.

Joel Branch reports to Russ Blattner, CEO. They are on a team with John Leschorn - CIO, David Bauer Jr - CTO & VP, Solution Delivery.