Liqiu Meng is an internationally distinguished cartographer. She studied cartography in China, did her PhD degree in Germany for a topic of automatic recognition of map text and got her professorship qualification in Sweden for the field of geoinformatics. In cooperation with the Swedish Armed Forces she led the largest Swedish research project for automatic geodata generalization. As member of senate of Helmholtz Association she is responsible for the research agenda “Earth and Environment”. Her scientific work has been mainly carried out in the Department of Cartography, Technical University of Munich, covering research areas of pattern recognition, spatial data integration, automatic map generalization, multimodal navigation algorithms, spatio-temporal urban information systems, map semiotics, adaptive visualization for mobile applications and AI in cartography.

Georg Gartner is a Professor for Cartography and Geo-Mediatechniques at the Research Group of Cartography at the Vienna University of Technology. He holds graduate qualifications in geography and cartography from the University of Vienna and the Vienna University of Technology, including a habilitation. He held the position of president of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) from 2011 to 2015 and served as past president from 2015 to 2019. Since 2023, he is again serving as ICA president. He is editor of the book series Lecture Notes on Geoinformation and Cartography (Springer-Verlag) and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal on Location-based Services (Taylor & Francis). He has founded the Conference Series on Location-based Services. He was co-founder of the International Master programme on Cartography with TU München, TU Dresden and Universiteit Twente. His main research interests lie in the role of modern cartography and applying LBS and interactivity to this role.