AI Forum

Ray has spent the last 45 years at the intersection of insights, research, and new thinking. Ray has held director-level positions with companies such as The Research Business, IntelliQuest, Millward Brown, and Vision Critical. Ray is committed to the research and insights industry, having been a member of ESOMAR for over 30 years and a fellow of the MRS. 

In recent years Ray’s work has focused on training, writing, speaking and sharing. Ray has run training workshops for a variety of national and international organisations, including RANZ, TRS, JMRA, MRS and ESOMAR. Ray has written textbooks, taught at Saitama and Nottingham Universities, regularly blogs, and is active on social media.

 In 2023 Ray was elected President of ESOMAR.

Joaquim Bretcha is ex-officio President of ESOMAR and an Economist at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. A current ESOMAR Council member, he has created and expanded the International Business Unit at Netquest since 2010. Both responsibilities give him the ability to stay permanently in touch with the international community of market research andstay tuned to the latest market developments.

Previously, he has served as Director of Marketing and Purchases at Auchan supermarkets in Spain, Retail Director at Kantar Worldpanel Spain and Merchandising Director at Carrefour supermarkets in Spain. Most recently he has co-founded the NGO “Health us Nepal” to bring health to the remote region of Humla and has had the experience of being a TEDx Talker in England. 

Eleanor ‘Nell’ Watson CITP FBCS FIAP FIKE FRSA FRSS FCMI FLS is a Machine Intelligence engineer who worked to pioneer Deep Machine Vision at her company QuantaCorp, which enables fast and accurate body measurement from just two photos.

In sharing her knowledge as AI Faculty at Singularity University and author of Machine Intelligence courseware for O’Reilly Media, she realised the importance of protecting human rights and putting ethics, safety, and the values of human spirit into A.I.

Nell serves as Chair & Vice-Chair respectively of the IEEE’s ECPAIS Transparency Experts Focus Group, and P7001 Transparency of Autonomous Systems committee on AI Ethics & Safety, engineering credit score-like mechanisms to safeguard algorithmic trust.

She also chairs EthicsNet.org, a community teaching pro-social behaviours to machines, CulturalPeace.org, crafting Geneva Conventions-style rules for cultural conflict, and Pacha.org, connecting a network of service providers to help enable the automated accounting of externalities such as pollution.

Nell serves as Senior Scientific Advisor to The Future Society at Harvard, and holds Fellowships from the British Computing Society, and Royal Statistical Society, among others.

Nell is also Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, where she works to develop practical solutions for today’s most pressing issues, in politics, economics, technology, and beyond, working across disciplines and topics.

Her public speaking has inspired audiences to work towards a brighter future at venues such as The World Bank, The United Nations General Assembly, and The Royal Society.

Annelies is the Chief Platform Officer at Human8. She currently holds a double role. As division manager of Human8 Timisoara (Romania), she is in charge of the set up and day to day management of the division.

As a ForwaR&D lab manager, she is responsible for innovation and the InSites portfolio for the whole group. In the past, she has been closely involved in the development of new listening and engagement research solutions like social media netnography, multimedia ethnography and text analytics.

She has a passion for insightment trajects and the fuzzy front end of innovation. She is a regular speaker at conferences (ESOMAR, MRS, MOA, baqmar) and she has been published several articles in trade & academic market research journals.

Melanie serves as the Chief Executive Officer at the Insights Association. As the leading voice, resource and network of the marketing research and data analytics community, the Insights Association helps its members create competitive advantage by investing in quality standards, legal and business advocacy, education, certification and direct support that enables our members to thrive in an evolving industry and drive business impact.

Melanie has spent more than 25 years designing, executing, and interpreting research for agencies and corporations, and is an industry voice in market research for quality, trends and the next generation of data collection. Known as an expert methodologist, she started her career at a full-service research firm in Dallas where she spent ten years developing her strong research background. She then followed that with a decade specializing in all forms of digital research including online, mobile and social. Melanie has successfully developed and launched leading sampling platforms, routers, methodology best practices, panels and research products.

Melanie contributes to standards and codes of conduct, is heavily involved in chairing and speaking at industry events, and is an award winning writer, researcher, and voice of data quality and best practices.

ESOMAR Corporate Member and participant of ESOMAR's CLICK series