Jenna M. Kline

About

I am a PhD candidate studying computer science and engineering at The Ohio State University, with an expected graduation date of Spring 2026.

Currently looking for Fall 2026 opportunities!

I develop agentic, multi-modal autonomous remote sensing systems that use edge AI to enable adaptive sampling for environmental monitoring.

My work creates intelligent agents that dynamically adjust their sensing strategies in real-time based on environmental conditions and data patterns. These systems combine computer vision, robotics, and edge computing to make autonomous decisions in the field, optimizing data collection for ecological research and conservation applications. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, I bridge cutting-edge AI capabilities with practical environmental monitoring needs.

I am fortunate to be coadvised by Dr. Christopher Stewart and Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf, and contribute to the ICICLE and Imageomics Research Institutes at OSU.

Check out my posts on bsky! 🦋

Projects

WildLabs Edge Computing Group, Co-lead, 2025–2026 Group Leadership Programme.

This group unites those working at the intersection of edge AI and conservation, focusing on real-time, on-device data processing for environmental monitoring to facilitate sharing tools, models, and strategies to overcome challenges in remote, low-connectivity areas. Join here!
Check out a curated list of edge AI for conservation resources.

SmartWilds: Bridging Digital and Natural Worlds

In collaboration with The Wilds, we are developing autonomous drones and edge AI systems for wildlife monitoring and conservation in this 10,000-acre non-profit safari park and conservation center in southeastern Ohio.
Check out the preprint and dataset on HuggingFace.

kabr-tools: Automated Framework for Multi-Species Behavioral Monitoring

Watching wildlife at scale is hard—traditional field observations are slow and limited. That’s why we built kabr-tools: an open-source system using drones + ML to automatically track multiple species and extract behavioral, social & spatial patterns. Check out the documentation and read the preprint on arXiv.

AI-Driven Animal Ecology Workloads at the Edge

Tool for haracterizing and modeling AI-Driven Animal Ecology (ADAE) studies at the edge. Try it out yourself here.

Selected Publications

Please refer to my Google Scholar for up-to-date paper list.

Studying collective animal behaviour with drones and computer vision

Jenna M. Kline, Saadia Afridi; Edouard G. A. Rolland; Guy Maalouf; Lucie Laporte‐Devylder; Christopher Stewart; Margaret Crofoot; Charles V. Stewart; Daniel I. Rubenstein; Tanya Berger‐Wolf
Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 2025
[Paper] [Video]

MMLA: Multi-Environment, Multi-Species, Low-Altitude Drone Dataset

Jenna M. Kline, Samuel Stevens, Guy Maalouf, Camille Rondeau Saint-Jean, Dat Nguyen Ngoc, Majid Mirmehdi, David Guerin, Tilo Burghardt, Elzbieta Pastucha, Blair Costelloe, Matthew Watson, Thomas Richardson, and Ulrik Pagh Schultz Lundquist
C4Animals Workshop @ CVPR 2025
[Paper] [Website] [Code] [Data] [Model]

WildWing: An open-source, autonomous and affordable UAS for animal behaviour video monitoring

Jenna M. Kline, Alison Zhong, Kevyn Irizarry, Charles V. Stewart, Christopher Stewart, Daniel I. Rubenstein, and Tanya Berger-Wolf
Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 2025
[Paper] [Code] [Data] [Blog]

Characterizing and Modeling AI-Driven Animal Ecology Studies at the Edge

Jenna M. Kline, Austin O'Quinn, Tanya Berger-Wolf and Christopher Stewart
ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing - SEC 2024
[Paper] [Code] [Slides]

A Framework for Autonomic Computing for In Situ Imageomics

Jenna M. Kline, Christopher Stewart, Tanya Berger-Wolf, Michelle Ramirez, Samuel Stevens, Reshma Ramesh Babu, Namrata Banerji, Alec Sheets, Sowbaranika Balasubramaniam, Elizabeth Campolongo, Matthew Thompson, Charles V. Stewart and Maksim Kholiavchenko, Daniel I. Rubenstein. Nina Van Tiel, and Jackson Miliko
4th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems - ACSOS 2023
[Paper] [Code]

Integrating Biological Data into Autonomous Remote Sensing Systems for In Situ Imageomics: A Case Study for Kenyan Animal Behavior Sensing with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

Jenna M. Kline, Maksim Kholiavchenko, Otto Brookes, Tanya Berger-Wolf, Charles V. Stewart, and Christopher Stewart
AAAI 2024, Workshop on Imageomics: Discovering Biological Knowledge from Images using AI
[Paper] [Data]

Invited Talks & Presentations

How do drones fit into multimodal sensing networks?

Poster presentation at WildDrone Summer School, at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany.. Poster available here.

Drones and AI in Field Animal Ecology: Integrating Biology, Animal Science, and Technology.

Invited lecture at the University of Findlay. Watch the recording here.

From Ohio to Kenya: Autonomous Drones in Field Ecology and Conservation

Conservation Science Symposium, Muskingum University and The Wilds, OH.

Individual Identification of Zebras with Autonomous UAV Swarms

Won first prize for Best Poster Award at the Translational Data Analytics Interdisciplinary Research Fall Forum 2024 in Columbus, OH.
Poster presenter at the 2023 Grad Cohort Workshop for Women (CRA-WP) in San Francisco, CA.

PhD Forum Talk: An Adaptive Autonomous Aerial System for Dynamic Field Animal Ecology Studies

Talk at 5th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems - ACSOS 2024. [Slides]

Autonomous Drones for Collective Wildlife Behavior

Invited lecture for WildDrone Seminar Series (Virtual). [Slides]

Intelligent Cyberinfrastructure for Remote Sensing with Autonomous Aerial Robotics: Applications in Animal Ecology and Digital Agriculture

Poster presenter at Translational Data Analytics Interdisciplinary Research Fall Forum 2023 in Columbus, OH.

Charting the Future of Harnessing Data Revolution (HDR) Ecosystem: Crafting a Collaborative Research Agenda

Session presenter at the 2023 NSF HDR Ecosystem Conference in Denver, CO.

Interdisciplinary Applications of Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (AUAVs): A Case Study for Capturing the Behavior of Kenyan Wildlife

Poster presenter at the 2023 STARS Celebration, co-located with Tapia Conference in Dallas, TX.

Interdisciplinary Applications for Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Speaker at the Ohio Celebration of Women in Computing 2023 in Huron, OH.

PhD Forum Talk: Edge Computing for Software-Defined Cartography

Talk at ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing (SEC 2022) in Seattle, WA.

Teaching

Data Management in the Cloud (CSE 3244)

Teaching Assistant, Autumn 2022
Lecture topics include systematic organization of data on cloud computing architectures, basic indexing techniques, including B-tree and hash-based indexing, fundamentals of query optimization, including access path selection and cardinality estimation, full and partial replication and data partitioning and distributed task scheduling.

Modeling and Problem Solving with Spreadsheets and Databases (CSE 2111)

Lab Instructor, Autumn 2021 & Spring 2022
Lecture topics include systematic organization of data on cloud computing architectures, basic indexing techniques, including B-tree and hash-based indexing, fundamentals of query optimization, including access path selection and cardinality estimation, full and partial replication and data partitioning and distributed task scheduling.

News

Selected for MIT Rising Stars in EECS Workshop. Oct 2025

Invited to the MIT Rising Stars Workshop, a program supporting women pursuing academic careers in EECS, with mentorship, networking, and career development activities.

Attended WildDrone Summer School at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany. Sept 2025

Attended the WildDrone Summer School to explore drone tech for wildlife monitoring. Presented poster: “How do drones fit into multimodal sensing networks?” [Poster] Also joined the AI+Environment Summit at ETH Zurich on AI for sustainability.

Summer fieldwork at The Wilds featured by Imageomics Research Institute. Jul 2025

Led team of students conducting fieldwork and collect data at the The Wilds in Cumberland, OH. [Read more].

Selected for WiscProf: Future Faculty in Engineering Workshop, University of Wisconsin–Madison. May 2025

Selected to participate in the WiscProf: Future Faculty in Engineering Workshop, a four-day program for senior PhD students and postdocs interested in academic careers in engineering. Engaged with faculty mentors, peers, and workshops on research, teaching, and career development.

Drone Research Featured in Ohio State News. Apr 2025

Ohio State News featured my research on autonomous drones for animal ecology, highlighting the potential impact of this technology on ecological research and conservation efforts. [Read more]

Graduate Student Research Award. Apr 2025

Research recognized with the Department of Computer Science Graduate Student Research Award, given in recognition of exceptional research contributions.

2025 Edward F. Hayes Advanced Research Forum Engineering Oral Presentation First Place. Feb 2025

Awarded first place for the Engineering Oral Presentation at the 2025 Edward F. Hayes Advanced Research Forum for the presentation "Autonomous, Adaptive Vision-Based Remote Sensing System for Dynamic Field Animal Ecology Studies". [Slides]

Fieldwork at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya with WildDrone. Jan 2025

Travelled to Kenya with the WildDrone team to test autonomous drones for wildlife monitoring at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy.

Successfully Passed PhD Candidacy Exam Nov 2024

Thesis proposal on "Autonomous, Adaptive Vision-Based In-Situ Remote Sensing System for Field Animal Ecology Studies" was approved by the committee, as first Imageomics institute PhD candidate.

Summer internship research project with the LANL Supercomputer Institute Summer School, titled "Seeing the trees for the forest: Describing HPC Filesystem Trees with the Grand Unified File-Index (GUFI)", presented at the SC23 Graduate Posters ACM Student Research Competition.

Imageomics Embarks on Kenya Research Experience. Jan 2023

Drone pilot conducting field work in Kenya at the Mpala Research Center to collect data for the KABR dataset.

CV

My CV is available here. For a full list of my publications, please refer to my Google Scholar.

Contact

kline.377 [at] osu.edu
DBLP | Orcid | ResearchGate