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 …
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 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 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 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 …
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 …
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 …
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 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 …
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.
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 …
"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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …