Dr. Bill C. Riemers

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Professional Autobiography

In December 1994, I earned my Ph.D. in High Energy physics from Purdue University for my thesis on Lepton Flavour Violations on the L3 Experiment at CERN.  I then went on to six months of Post Doctorate work at Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory, before starting my own business, Dr Bill's Consulting Service, late 1995.

In the world of computers, I was already well known for my work improving GNU programs including the BCR MAIL HANDLER, VGASET, and TERM.  (TERM is a user level transfer protocol once more popular than PPP and SLIP in the Unix community).  I was also well known in the Linux community for their emergency boot floppies, and their Linux distributor list (which later became the Linux DISTRIBUTION HOWTO).  Also, to this day, I still continue my involvement in the open source community with the DjVuLibre and coLinux projects.

In the summer of 1996, Joe Orost of AT&T at "Bell Laboratories", recruited me as a consultant to work on performance enhancements for AT&T's Easylink Services.  In September 1995, AT&T annnounced a split which divided "Bell Laboratories into three entities; "AT&T Laboratories", "Lucent Bell Laboratories Innovations", and "NCR".  Joe Orost then requested I become a direct employee of the newly created AT&T Labs.

I worked at AT&T Labs as a Senior Technical Staff Member of Joe Orost's SWAT Team, Software Technology Services at AT&T Labs.  My primary tasks as a member of this team was to reengineer services for WEB access, formulate performance enhancements, port code, and develop new software tools.

My next project at AT&T was to create a web data repository for AT&T Direct Ocean Global Consumer Services.  We developed this site using a combination of HTML, Javascript, and MetaHTML scripts.  MetaHTML is a GNU server side FastCGI engine that extends HTML with scripting tags with similar functionality to Perl but within the web page itself.

In early 1998, I requested Joe Orost to approach AT&T Labs Research in response to their call for help productizing DjVu for public use.  An alliance was quickly formed, and I spent the next two years leading development efforts as Project Leader for DjVu Development.

In March 2000, AT&T sold DjVu to LizardTech, Inc.  Although I really enjoyed my job at AT&T Labs, I recognized the need to have at least one expert at LizardTech, Inc. and I joined the Seattle-based company as Software Architect Manager in charge of DjVu Development.  At LizardTech, Inc. I led the team responsible for the continued development of Core DjVu Products including the DjVu Reference Library, DjVu Decode SDK, DjVu Encode SDK, and the DjVu plug-in/Active X viewers.  I also took a lead role in designing and implementing the initial versions of other DjVu products, and at times contributing to the research efforts.  This new image compression scheme, called DjVu, makes practical the publishing of scanned documents onto the internet.

In February, 2002, I concluded my mandate at LizardTech, Inc.  My team had grown into experts themselves, ready to tackle DjVu development on their own. So, I came full circle, and returned to my business, now called Foxtrot Technologies.  In addition to my business endeavours, I plan to take time to publish some of the more interesting things I've learned over the years and to research and develop a variety of innovative ideas.