Rick Bettencourt, of Building Block Software(BBS), has had a prominent career as a software developer, architect and technologist. In 1984, Rick graduated third in his class from the University of Lowell, majoring in Computer Science. Since college, Rick has been employed by the Eastman Kodak Co, Apollo Computer Inc., HighSoft Inc., and Building Block Software.
Recently, Rick has been contracting through Building Block Software, providing Java solutions for companies of all sizes. Of late, he has completed a distributed, realtime, radiation monitoring system for MJWCorp in Buffalo NY. He is currently in the process of re-architecting Eastman Kodak Company's Picture Maker 8.0 Kiosk product. In addition, he is working on an Audio/Video system for the StereoShop of Henrietta NY.
While an employee at the Eastman Kodak Co., Rick was the lead architect for the Kodak Color Management System (KCMS), a platform independent, object oriented, architecture. The first application of KCMS was as the foundation for ColorSense, a Macintosh and Windows Color Management application tool. Sun Microsystems then purchased KCMS, as the Solaris framework for their extensible, ICC compatible, color management solution. Rick was instrumental in the Intelligent Color Imaging & Communications (ICIC) infrastructure done at Kodak that integrated imaging into the compound document models of OLE, Taligent and OpenDoc. He was also on the Kodak Image Management (KIMS) "first systems" team, providing a diagnostics subsystem and a low cost alternative display system, for image manipulation and window management. Before leaving Kodak, he was one of the original architects for the Image Manipulation Architecture(IMA), a scalable imaging architecture for parallel, distributed, imaging applications. Sun MicroSystem's, JavaSoft, also exploited the original design patterns of IMA for their latest Java2D imaging extensions. Recently, Rick received the patent: "A Camera for Generating and Recording Object Data with the Recorded Image" for Kodak.
At Apollo Computer Inc., Rick lead the development of one and contributed to five graphics device drivers. He was responsible for the intermediate 2D graphics libraries and their integration with the OS, 3D, Xwindows, and Apollo's proprietary windowing system. He also designed and implemented a virtual colortable manager which allowed the sharing of logical and physical colortables from many processes across the Apollo product line.
As a Principal Software Architect for HighSoft Inc., Rick had lead the framework technology team supporting three different products in Java and C++. These frameworks integrated proprietary recording/playback technologies, Quicktime 3.0 and QuickTime4Java. They also extended Quicktime to include a grouping mechanism and justifications of its elements.
Rick owns his own contract software consulting company, Building Block Software, and was a senior partner in the, Rochester NY SW developer cooperative, Xpert Solutions. He is currently a member of SOFA, IEEE, ACM and the U-Lowell Alumni Association. Rick devotes his spare time to his family, his garden and if he has any left, he writes non-violent, interactive, 3D games.
