I have only worked as an employee of my own companies. I have never worked as a direct employee of another company, this timeline is like a CV.
Prepared for the purpose of making application to the UK Highly Skilled Migrant Programme (HSMP).
Name: Scott Shannon Lafferty
Date of Birth: April 25, 1957 Dallas, Texas USA
Education:
- Parkwood Elementary School Seattle, Washington State, USA (1963 to 1970)
- Butler Junior-High School Seattle, Washington State, USA (1971 to 1973)
- Shorecrest Senior-High School Seattle, Washington State, USA (1974 to 1976)
Formal Qualifications:
| Motor Boat Captain-issue 1 | US Coast Guard License (1975) |
| Ocean Passenger Captain-Issue 1 | US Coast Guard License (1977) |
| Ocean Passenger Captain-Issue 2 | US Coast Guard License (1982) |
Experience:
1973-1974 At the age of 16 and 17, I worked as deckhand on charter passenger fishing boats between schooling and 7 days a week in the summers.
1975 At age 18, I studied for my Motorboat captain’s license with documented sea-time. Passed examinations for the United States Coast Guard captain license. I was the youngest licensed captain in America at the time. Operated boats between schooling.
1975-1985 Operated charter passenger fishing boats. See newspaper and magazine articles.
1976 At age 19, I studied for the much grander and harder to get Ocean Passenger captain’s licence, able to operate ferry boats and small ships. Passed examinations for United States Coast Guard Ocean Passenger captain licence. Again, was the youngest licensed captain of that class in America at the time. Operated charter boats full time. See attached documents of first and second licences issued.
1976 At age 19, I bought my own 32-foot US Coast Guard certified charter boat with my own money and the bank. Now I have a bank loan to pay back but I can operate my own boat.
1977 At age 20, I founded “Fresh & Wild Seafood Company” to sell seafood to my charter customers and the public in the off season. I would buy freshly caught seafood from the commercial fishermen at Westport and drive the loads to Seattle and sell at a prearranged list of locations.
1977 At age 20, Bought my first micro-computer. Computers at that time had very little in the way of useful software programs. So I started to learn how to program software and write my own customer tracking, fishing spot location tracking and boat navigation systems. Many books and many long nights later things started to take shape. So began my lifelong passion and hobby of computer programming.
1985 Winter: started to program my first sonar survey mapping system. It was the first system of its kind in the world for underwater mapping and survey industries.
1986 Retired my charter fishing and seafood companies to co-found Info Express, Inc., to further develop and promote sonar survey mapping technologies. See note in main body of text. Also see Steve Lambert’s letter.
1986 Spring-summer: first customer for my sonar mapping system was a treasure hunter looking for the SS Central America which sunk off of Carolina USA, in 1857. The system worked first time. After 44 days of continuous at sea operations, the ship was found, resulting in one of the richest sub-sea treasures ever recovered to date. See newspaper and magazine articles.
1986 Amoco Oil Company used Info Express systems in the Gulf of Mexico USA for an oil platform and pipeline risk assessment and hazard survey. First 100% digitally produced reporting system.
1986 Built a direct connect computer board for the EG&G 260 sonar. First of its kind in the industry.
1986-1987 Amoco was delivered the world’s first digitally built computer automated sonar mosaic. This was another industry first.
1987 Shell Oil Company, USA, ordered from Info Express an analogue-to-digital logging, display and processing system. Which was the first of its kind. This system was delivered, and installed by Info Express, and the ship’s personnel were trained for their first operation only. The system operated continuously for five years until the ship was decommissioned. During this whole period we were not called for repairs and no downtime at sea was reported. Unheard of for systems at sea.
1988 Info Express was awarded a major military contract from the Royal Australian Navy, for which 27 international companies competed. Most of which were billion-dollar companies, but Info Express, Inc, the smallest and newest company, won. As a result it became necessary for Info Express to hire its first employees to help develop the Royal Australian Navy Mine-Counter-Measure (MCM) systems.
1988 Royal Australian Navy issued an import certificate for $1.75 million Australian dollars’ worth of equipment (see attached document).
1988-1991 Now 100% of my time was being spent on the Navy contracts. As this was a multi-year endeavour. And as it turned out, the Navy awarded Info Express many more contracts. One of which was the Mine Warfare Command Centre (see attached photos with Steve Lambert’s letter). Over a six-year period, we received a total of around 4.5 million dollars’ worth of contracts, with a maximum of eight employees.
1990-1994 Various standard-type oil and gas projects from around the world, such as Perth, Australia, Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, and Vietnam.
1991-1992 India Bombay High project. The largest complex of oil platforms and pipelines in the world. Some 192 oil platforms and 250 pipelines all in one area. This was the world’s largest survey of its type at the time. Reporting was produced directly from Info Express systems to client reports. Another industry first.
1992-1994 Maintained Royal Australian Navy MCM (mine counter-measures) systems. Info Express helped train over 100 Navy personnel and refine their operational and training procedures.
1993 The Royal Australian Navy set up a program to re-market and export the whole MCMADI system suite to other navy’s around the world. This shows how much faith they have in the Info Express systems. As I owned all the Intellectual Property Rights of the products, I had a lot to gain from this partnership. (See attached news articles and quote request).
1994 First visit to the United Kingdom, during which time I carried out a marketing tour of the UK and Europe to demonstrate the Info Express systems to European industrialists.
1995 As governments worldwide started cutting back on military spending, Australian government did major military spending cuts and the re-market program was caught up in the slashing. Well we gave it a good go anyway. Info Express went back to its roots of servicing the oil and gas industries.
1995 System was used in Archangel, Russia to map gravel beds on the sea floor in search of the deposit of blue diamonds. This location was found to have the largest concentration of blue diamonds in the world. This was one of the first major surveys using western technology in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
1995 Caspian Sea. Even though oil production in the Caspian Sea oil fields have been in operation for a 100+ years, this was the first field-wide seabed survey ever done.
1995-2002 Various standard type oil projects from around the world, such as Cape Town, South Africa, Norway, many Western African oil field projects and many other locations.
1995-1996 As Info Express software could only run on our proprietary hardware platforms at that time, and the overhead of building those systems was getting cost prohibitive, I re-wrote and converted all systems to the Windows NT/2000 platforms.
1996 Sage Survey in Bath was chosen to be Info Express’s world-wide sales and marketing representatives. See copy of agreement.
1996-1997 Philippines. What can I say, this was the largest, most detailed, highest resolution survey ever in the world, even until now. Royal Dutch Shell wanted to make this project the flagship of technology. It was the largest deployment of my oil survey packages ever. The entire inventory Info Express had, plus buying more base computers, were placed on one single ship. The amount of data produced was phenomenal. Info Express systems had to process the data from all the other computers that were controlling and acquiring data from various sensors and devices from around the ship. Upwards of 5 gigabytes of data had to be processed and reported every day, and all data must be available from the start of the project. Over the 320 days of working, some 1600 gigabytes of data was stored and available for interpretation. Another industry first.
1998 Started to research into how the Stock Market and exchanges worked. With the objective of seeing if I could use my computer programming skills to track and monitor the markets.
1999-2000 Belgium Rivers Project. Belgium had a special requirement to underwater map all their canals, rivers, waterways, ports, harbours and major lakes. They also had a requirementto database every object in those waters, like junk thrown into the canals and rivers, car bodies mostly of stolen cars and many other objects. In addition, this required 10 millimetre digitising of the edges of all waterways, something which had never been tried before. Another industry first.
2000-now Career advancement training and research. I have been investing in myself, by training up on the latest computer ideas and technologies. Looking at things outside my normal skills. As I always want to be on the latest edge of technology.
2001-now Started programming, as a hobby, the Stock Market tracking and display system, for myself. It is still a work in progress and not ready for any commercial use. I do have interest from several companies to take it farther. And getting this HSMP permit will help me accomplish this goal better.
2002-now While working on the Stock Market project, I came up with a new way doing Artificial Intelligence computer thinking, and Machine Learning techniques. I think it will be another industry first. With applications in the Stock Market of course, but I see a bigger picture in areas of land mine and bomb detection, food quality control, medical research and diagnose of diseases and infections, chemical detection and classification. Again, getting this HSMP permit will help me accomplish this goal better.