About this course
- Course
- CIS 7000-008 · CRN 92792 · Fall 2026
- Instructor
- Jérémie Lumbroso, Practice Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science — lumbroso@seas.upenn.edu
- When
- Thursdays, 5:15 PM–8:14 PM · first meeting Thursday, August 27
- Where
- Towne 217
- How to enroll
- Permit-only: 20 seats, by application. The application link is being finalized — write to the instructor in the meantime.
Computationally Assisted Metacognition (CAM) — thinking better, with AI, across domains. A seminar on using frontier language models as instruments of reflection: students iterate live with models, read their reasoning traces, and turn their own thinking into something they can inspect, critique, and revise. Sessions are hands-on and discussion-driven, built around exercises drawn from real human–AI collaborations. A technical spine for CIS majors and graduate students (a conceptual track for others): how frontier models are built and run; running local models; API calls against local and cloud models; building and deploying MCP servers and tools; how context is composed and retrieved. Culminates in a build — a harnessed personal agent each student constructs and deploys. Open to graduate and undergraduate students by application; waitlist.
By the end of the course, students can:
- Use a frontier model as an instrument of reflection — externalize a question, iterate, and read the model’s reasoning trace critically rather than accept its answer.
- Recognize and name metacognitive moves — reframing, decomposition, steelmanning, falsification — in their own conversation transcripts.
- Explain how frontier models are built and run (architecture, training, inference, context) well enough to predict their failure modes.
- Build and deploy tools a model can call — API clients, MCP servers — locally and remotely.
- Construct, deploy, and document a harnessed personal agent, including the design decisions behind it.
Sessions use Slido throughout, with names attached. In a course on metacognition we are invested in owning our own opinions: taking a stance, being wrong — including being wrong in public — is not a bad thing. What we are developing is the practice of adapting to new information and new evidence.