Timothy Luciani, Ph.D.

Current Work

I joined Publicis Epsilon in 2019 and now lead the Decision Sciences Visual Analytics Systems team, directing a group of PhD research scientists and engineers building DiME — a visual storytelling platform that turns petascale marketing data into data-rich narratives, used to show prospective clients how Epsilon can reach their customers and lift return on ad spend. I am one of three pod leads reporting to the VP of Decision Sciences Visual Analytics, and I serve on the Decision Sciences AI Steering Committee.

Most of my recent work sits at the intersection of large language models and real-time, production analytics. My team builds retrieval-augmented generation systems over proprietary marketing data, surfaced through DiME as conversational exploration of audiences and personas. Behind that sits the evaluation infrastructure that makes the systems trustworthy: LLM-as-a-Judge harnesses, retrieval-quality benchmarking, and response-quality monitoring that let us assess deployments continuously rather than at release. At the end of the day our users never see this layer, which is the point of it.

The platform side is equally large. I oversee the data and infrastructure strategy behind DiME: distributed processing in an enterprise-scale Hadoop cluster and Databricks, PostgreSQL at scale, Kubernetes, and GPU-scheduled Airflow for the clustering models that generate our personas. I also led our team's data-governance program through audit, remediation, and verified closure across every production environment our team owns and operates.

Before Epsilon I completed a PhD in computer science at the University of Illinois Chicago, working on problem-driven design for scientific visualization across oncology, computational fluid dynamics, bioinformatics, and astronomy. That work is below.

Research