Research

I am now investigating AI understanding and safety: how AI agents behave, especially when they interact with one another, and how to evaluate them before they are deployed. My most recent project studied collusion between LLM pricing agents.

I completed my Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at UC Santa Barbara in 2010. My research focused on content-based image retrieval - a mix of machine learning, computer vision, and search - supported by an interdisciplinary fellowship in digital multimedia from NSF. Before that, at Rutgers University, I worked on speech processing and microphone arrays in Jim Flanagan's lab. My master's thesis combined face detection with acoustic speaker location for steering a hands-free videoconferencing system.

AI Safety Research

• J. Kleban. "Better Angels Have Their Limits: Collusion in Mixed LLM Pricing Games." AI Collusion Research Sprint, Apart Research, 2026. pdf project page

Press & Talks

• Ness Labs Interview - on Supernormal and AI for modern work
• Stripe Blog - Radar analytics improvements
• IEEE Spectrum - fighting misinformation at Facebook
• Search Engine Watch - inside Bing's spell checker

Selected Publications

• Lihong Li, Shunbao Chen, Jim Kleban, and Ankur Gupta. "Counterfactual Estimation and Optimization of Click Metrics for Search Engines." World Wide Web Conference, 2015. pdf
• Victor Fragoso, Steffen Gauglitz, S. Zamora, Jim Kleban, M. Turk. "TranslatAR: A mobile augmented reality translator." IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2011. pdf
• J. Kleban, E. Moxley, J. Xu, and B. S. Manjunath. "Global Annotation of Georeferenced Photographs." ACM Conference on Image and Video Retrieval, 2009. pdf
• E. Moxley, J. Kleban, J. Xu, and B. S. Manjunath. "Not All Tags Are Created Equal: Learning Flickr Tag Semantics for Global Annotation." IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, 2009. pdf
• J. Kleban, E. Moxley, B. S. Manjunath. "SpiritTagger: A Location-Aware Interactive Web Tool for Annotating Your Photo Collection." Workshop on Media Arts, Science, and Technology (MAST), 2009.
• Dan Overholt, John Thompson, Lance Putnam, Bo Bell, Jim Kleban, Bob Sturm, and JoAnn Kuchera-Morin. "A Multimodal System for Gesture Recognition in Interactive Music Performance." Computer Music Journal 33:4, Winter 2009.
• E. Moxley, J. Kleban, B. S. Manjunath. "SpiritTagger: A Geo-Aware Tag Suggestion Tool Mined from Flickr." ACM International Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval, 2008. pdf
• J. Kleban, X. Xie, and W. Y. Ma. "Spatial Pyramid Mining for Logo Detection in Natural Scenes." International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, 2008. pdf
• J. Kleban, A. Sarkar, E. Moxley, S. Mangiat, S. Joshi, T. Kuo, and B. S. Manjunath. "Feature fusion and redundancy pruning for rush video summarization." International Workshop on TRECVID Video Summarization - ACM-MM, 2007. pdf
• B. Bell, J. Kleban, D. Overholt, L. Putnam, J. Thompson, and J. Kuchera-Morin. "The multimodal music stand." New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), 2007. pdf