Is this a game, or is it real?

40 Years of Programming

Keith Lawson — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0400

40 Years of Programming

I wanted to write a little history of how/why I learned to code and articulate my love of computing and engineering that my children could read. That's the inspiration for this posting.

When I was a teenager movies like WarGames (note the title for my …

It's Your Health Data. You Can't Have It.

Keith Lawson — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

DISCLAIMER: This article reflects my personal experiences as a patient within the Ontario healthcare system and my expertise as a computer scientist and doctoral engineering student. The views expressed are mine alone and do not represent the positions of my employer, London Health Sciences Centre, nor are they related to …

rlsecd: A Streaming RL Security Daemon

Keith Lawson — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

rlsecd: A Streaming RL Security Daemon

In my Security-Gym post I described the environment I built to generate realistic cybersecurity log streams for RL experiments. The next conditions I wanted to test were to see if a continual learning agent can actually detect attacks in this data running as a …

Security-Gym: A Streaming RL Benchmark from Real Attack Data

Keith Lawson — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Security-Gym: A Streaming RL Benchmark from Real Attack Data

Over the past several months I've been running streaming RL experiments on real attack data extracted from a Cowrie SSH honeypot. The RL agent performance on the Cowrie data is promising and I wanted to continue testing different algorithms. However I …

Validating Streaming Deep RL on Attack Traffic

Keith Lawson — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Validating Streaming Deep RL on Attack Traffic

I'm continuing to focus on RL prediction steps 1/2 of the Alberta Plan. In my first experiment, I showed that IDBD diverges almost immediately on the real honeypot data I'm collecting and testing with. Given enough time Autostep fared much better but …

Demonstrating Adaptive Step-Size Algorithm Needs External Normalization

Keith Lawson — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Testing Real-World Data on IDBD and Autostep

My strategy for learning the foundations and contributing to the Alberta Plan for AI Research is to begin at Step 1 and work my way through the plan, learning and reading the associated literature as I go. This should give me a solid …

JAX Performance: From 63 Minutes to 2 Minutes

Keith Lawson — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0500

30x Speedup with vmap: Why JAX is Built for RL Research

I continue to be impressed with the JAX library as I learn how to use it. In my last post I mentioned switching from PyTorch to JAX for the alberta-framework. I had seen about a 2.78x speedup just …

My Path to a Doctor of Engineering at 50

Keith Lawson — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Thirty Years Later: My Non-Traditional Path to a Doctor of Engineering in AI

Research is rarely a straight line. For me, the path began thirty years ago when I first graduated with a Computer Science degree. Now, at age 50 and serving as a CISO in the healthcare sector, I'm …

Replicating Sutton 1992

Keith Lawson — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Replicating the Foundations: Sutton 1992 and the Alberta Plan

As I officially begin my D.Eng, I've been eager to start producing something. My method of learning has always been to understand things "under the hood". I don't feel I fully understand concepts until I can learn them from the …

About Me

Keith Lawson — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Keith Lawson is CISO at London Health Sciences Centre with 25+ years in cybersecurity and systems engineering. Currently pursuing a Doctor of Engineering at the University of Michigan researching reinforcement learning.

2025 Review

Keith Lawson — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0500

This is my first annual review. Credit to Will Larson's practice of doing this as my inspiration for doing the same. Thanks Will!

This year started out with being declined on my application to University of Michigan which led me to explore a whole bunch of different things from continuing …

When Platforms Monetize Anger: Reclaiming Attention in a Broken Internet

Keith Lawson — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

"If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you'd be furious. Yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along, so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled—have you no shame in that?" — Epictetus, Enchiridion, 28

The Oxford Word of the Year for …

D.Eng. Preparation - 2 Month Plan

Keith Lawson — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0400

I've completed the University of Alberta Reinforcement Learning Specialization which involved reading most of the Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction. In my original and updated RL learning roadmaps I was striving to actually start implementing something. I did get a start on some Pytorch implementations of basic algorithms but ended up …

RL Roadmap - Updated 3 Month Plan

Keith Lawson — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0400

I'm a month into my initial Reinforcement Learning Roadmap and a couple things have changed. First of all I've been accepted to University of Michigan Dearborn to begin a Doctor of Engineering degree in January 2026. Second my learnings from the first four weeks have convinced me that I need …

Reinforcement Learning Roadmap

Keith Lawson — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0400

My journey into understanding machine learning began with a 12 week learning syllabus that chatGPT prepared for me. That lead me to the Coursera Deep Learning Specialization which I just completed. The quality of Coursera specialization was excellent and I have a good understanding of the foundations of deep learning …

Developers in the age of AI

Keith Lawson — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0400

I heard the term "Full-Breadth Developers" on a episode of Changelog this morning. While I agree with everything Justin says in his post I have a, perhaps controversial take on new terms that are popping up for developers these days. Software developers today are just what they were when I …

Deep Learning 8 Week Summary

Keith Lawson — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0400

This is a summary of my first 8 weeks following my 12 week deep learning path generated by ChatGPT. The journey focused primarily on Andrew Ng's Deep Learning Specialization on Coursera, which proved to be an excellent foundational resource.

Week 1: Neural Network Fundamentals

I started with the basics of …

Bridge Network Configuration With Colima and Docker

Keith Lawson — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0400

This issue caused me way more time than I would like to admit so I'm writing this blog posting in hopes it will help someone else and save them some time.

I'm in the process of making the switch from developing with vim directly on Linux servers to using VS …

12 Week Deep Learning Syllabus

Keith Lawson — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Research truly is a winding path. I started along a path of interoperability of digital health records looking at protocols, current systems and considering methods for modifying protocols, filesystems with very high level goals of:

Putting control of the full health record including charts, results, diagnostic imaging etc into the …

Creating A Static HTML Blog Deployed with CI/CD

Keith Lawson — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400

In thinking about creating and maintaining this blog I had a few requirements to keep it simple, learn a few things along the way and hopefully work on my goal of coding more this year.

You can find the an example git repistory here to start with.

Requirements

Keep it …

Adding Value Through Cybersecurity

Keith Lawson — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400

This post originated from comments John Carmack made on Lex Fridman's podcast (41:04) about motivators for software developers "Everything we're doing really should flow from user value". He goes on to talk about how exercises like code golf are great challenges and completing or "winning" them is a great …

Lockbit, Ransomware as a Service & Outlawing Payments

Keith Lawson — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400

This post is adapted from a paper I wrote for a masters course in early 2024.

Introduction

Ransomware is a global problem that has significant financial and business operations impact to organisations that are victims of attacks. The proliferation of Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) has led to an explosion …

Goals

Keith Lawson — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Taking a page from Will Larson's blog and his year in review postings I decided to start tracking my own goals. I haven't decided on the actual timelines for these goals but based on what I am putting here today these 12 month to 6 year goals.

Obtain a Doctor …