Evironmental Systems Research Institute (Esri), the leader in geographic information systems software (GIS) partnered with our Global Digital Retailing Research Center on September 13 for an event held at our UNT campus Driving Customer Engagement in Retail & Hospitality.  The event, attended by industry executives, university faculty and researchers along with former students featured keynote speakers Brian Kilcourse from Retail Systems Research, Ralph Torres from Ulta Beauty, Peter Lenz from Dstillery, Christopher Smith from UberMedia, Dr. Matt Niblett from Harbor Freight, Joel McCune from Esri and Dr. Jonathan Wilson and Shawn Hanna from Retail Scientifics. The full agenda included research findings, consumer behavior patterns and analysis including current trends, data modeling, site analytics machine learning and logistics. Our own Dr. Murray Rice and Dr. Chetan Tiwari from UNT's Geography department rounded out the presentations, informing attendees on the latest university research on the topics.