Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the use of metacognition in intelligent systems. This essay is part of a small section meant to give interested researchers an overview and sampling of the kinds of work currently being pursued in this broad area. The current essay offers a review of recent research in two main topic areas: the monitoring and control of reasoning (metareasoning) and the monitoring and control of learning (metalearning). What is metacognition in computation? Rosie (the robot maid from the TV show The Jetsons) spends her days cooking, cleaning, ironing, and attending to the usual household tasks of late 21 st century life. Because of a bug in one of her memory chips, however, she almost always forgets to buy dog food when she goes out. She has an adequate recovery plan for this: she simply feeds Astro some of the Jetson’s dinner. But 21 st century human food is expensive, so this strategy is wasteful. Realizing this, and recognizing that she has forgotten several times, Rosie adopts a special strategy to help her remember: she sticks the spare dog collar in her

An analysis of human planning strategies reveals that much of the knowledge that underlies intelligent planning involves commonsense psychology, the way that people think that they think. In this paper we describe our continuing effort to formalize a large-scale theory of commonsense psychology as 30 interrelated content theories in first-order logic. This paper discusses key aspects of the 16 content theories that we have completed, focusing on those that provide an account of how knowledge and intention lead to action, namely, memory, knowledge management, envisionment, goals, planning, and execution. Some of these areas present challenges to many of the simplifying assumptions that have traditionally been made in formal knowledge representation research; others are areas of commonsense knowledge where few formal treatments have previously been attempted. 1