Personal History

Claude Bétrisey is originally from Switzerland, born and raised in the heart of Valais in the village of Saint-Léonard, famous for its underground lake, a popular tourist attraction.

He studied computer science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), located on the scenic shores of Lake Geneva. There, he completed his Ph.D. thesis on digital typography, focusing on automatic hint generation for typographic characters based on a topological model.

In 1990, while working on his Ph.D., Claude contributed to a European workstation project (CORDIS Project 2569), specifically to the text rendering engine part of a Display PostScript system.

In 1993, Claude moved to the United States to join Microsoft, where he contributed to groundbreaking work in digital typography, text rendering, and software engineering for over three decades. During his time at Microsoft, he met his wife Gloria. Together, they have one daughter, Paloma.

Paloma was the first in the family to move to the Palouse region, attending Washington State University (WSU) to study veterinary medicine. There, she met her husband, Mathew, and they now have a son, Maverick—Claude and Gloria's beloved grandchild.

Early in the pandemic, Claude and Gloria relocated to the Palouse to be closer to family, settling in Pullman, WA. In 2025, Claude joined Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL), a leading local company, where he continues to apply his expertise in software engineering and DevOps.

Experience

  • Senior Software Engineer – Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL), Pullman, WA, USA (Mar 2025 – Present)
    DevOps team: Modernizing, standardizing, and hardening security of build, test, and release processes for software and firmware development teams.
    Skills: DevOps, Software Design, Software Infrastructure, Jenkins, Kubernetes
  • Microsoft (31+ years)
    • Senior Software Design Engineer, Windows Code Flow Team (Sep 2022 – Jan 2025, Remote, Pullman, WA)
      Daily code flow and production on Windows build. Skills: Windows DevOps
    • Principal Developer, Debugger Team (Sep 2017 – Sep 2022, Redmond, WA, Hybrid)
      Debugger tools, WinDbg, Time Travel Debugging. Skills: Windows DevOps
    • Principal Developer, Windows Engineering (Sep 2012 – Sep 2017, Redmond, WA, On-site)
      Internal data and security tools. Skills: Windows DevOps
    • Development Lead, Windows Text Team (Sep 1999 – Sep 2012, Redmond, WA, On-site)
      Text rendering in Windows and Microsoft UI frameworks (GDI+, WPF, Silverlight, XAML). Added .NET 2.0 test app support. Skills: Windows DevOps
    • Software Design Engineer, Windows Text Team (Sep 1997 – Sep 1999, Redmond, WA, On-site)
      International text support, ClearType integration.
    • Software Design Engineer, Microsoft Typography Team (Jul 1993 – Sep 1997, Redmond, WA, On-site)
      TrueType rasterizer and font production tool development. See more at Microsoft Typography.
  • Research Assistant and Doctorate Candidate – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) (Sep 1988 – Jul 1993)

Education

  • Ph.D. in Computer Science, Digital Typography – EPFL (Sep 1988 – Jun 1993)
    Thesis: "Automatic hint generation for typographic characters based on a topological model."
    Research assistant, teacher assistant
  • Bachelor's degree, Computer Engineering – EPFL (Sep 1984 – Jul 1988)

Publications

  • Displaced Filtering for Patterned Displays, Society for Information Display, Jul 5, 2012
  • Perceptually tuned generation of grayscale fonts, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Jul 1, 1995
  • Advanced grid constraints: performances and limitations, Raster Imaging and Digital Typography II, Cambridge University Press, Nov 21, 1991
  • Model-based matching and hinting of fonts, SIGGRAPH'91 Proceedings, ACM Computer Graphics, Jul 4, 1991

Patents

  • Automatic optimization of the position of stems of text characters (US-7148893-B2, Dec 12, 2006)
  • Methods and apparatus for filtering and caching data representing images (US-7130480-B2, Oct 31, 2006)
  • Automatic optimization of the position of stems of text characters (US-20050237342-A1, Oct 27, 2005)
  • Automatic optimization of the position of stems of text characters (US-6950103-B2, Sep 27, 2005)
  • Hardware-enhanced graphics acceleration of pixel sub-component-oriented images (US-6897879-B2, May 24, 2005)
  • Methods and apparatus for filtering and caching data representing images (US-20040151398-A1, Aug 5, 2004)
  • Method and apparatus for filtering and caching data representing images (US-6738526-B1, May 18, 2004)
  • Automatic optimization of the position of stems of text characters (US-20040004618-A1, Jan 8, 2004)
  • Hardware-enhanced graphics acceleration of pixel sub-component-oriented images (US-20030174145-A1, Sep 18, 2003)
  • Automatic optimization of the position of stems of text characters (US-6597360-B1, Jul 22, 2003)
  • Rendering sub-pixel precision characters having widths compatible with pixel precision characters (US-6377262-B1, Apr 23, 2003)
  • Method and apparatus for variable weight outline emboldening of scalable outline fonts (US-6498608-B1, Dec 24, 2002)
  • Methods apparatus and data structures for enhancing the resolution of images to be rendered on patterned display devices (US-6393145-B2, May 21, 2002)
  • Adjusting character dimensions to compensate for low contrast character features (US-6360023-B1, Mar 19, 2002)
  • Methods and systems for asymmetric supersampling rasterization of image data (US-6356278-B1, Mar 12, 2002)
  • Methods apparatus and data structures for enhancing the resolution of images to be rendered on patterned display devices (US-20010048764-A1, Dec 6, 2001)
  • Maintaining advance widths of existing characters that have been resolution enhanced (US-6282327-B1, Aug 28, 2001)
  • Method for producing contrast-controlled grayscale characters (US-5796409-A, Aug 18, 1998)
  • Method for producing visually evenly spaced typographic characters (US-5768490-A, Jun 16, 1998)

Languages

  • English (Native or bilingual proficiency)
  • French (Native or bilingual proficiency)
  • German (Elementary proficiency)
  • Italian (Elementary proficiency)
  • Spanish (Limited working proficiency)