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Weilong Ren, a computer science doctoral student, was awarded the University Fellowship for the 2020-2021 academic year. Read further to learn more about his research, future goals and Kent State experience.

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1. Please give a short overview of your research.
   
   My current research is query processing over incomplete data, which is an important and fundamental research topic still in its infancy period. In many real-world applications, it is not uncommon to have ubiquitous incomplete data, due to various reasons such as transmission errors, packet losses, environmental factors, privacy protection and so on. Traditional data analytics approaches usually assume that the underlying data are complete, which cannot be directly borrowed to handle incomplete data (with missing attribute values). Therefore, I would like to study how to efficiently and effectively process a series of queries (e.g., top-k) over static or dynamic (e.g., stream) incomplete data.
    
2. What made you choose to pursue your graduate degree here at Kent State?
   
   The main reason I chose Kent State for pursuing my Ph.D. was mainly because of one of my advisors, Dr. Xiang Lian. I had heard of Dr. Lian, an expert in the database area, before I came to the United States. Thus, I was happy to choose Kent State to pursue my degree.
    
3. What do you enjoy most about attending Kent State for graduate school?
   
   Since attending Kent State for graduate school starting in the fall of 2017, I have been enjoying working and communicating with the experienced professors and talented schoolmates in the department of computer science, which helps me quite a lot.
    
4. What are your future goals?
   
   My main career goal for the future is to seek a faculty position after completing my Ph.D.
    
5. What does this award mean to you and how will it aid you?
   
   I will regard the University Fellowship Award as a recognition of my past research effort. The University Fellowship Award will enable me to have more time to focus on my research on incomplete data management, which will benefit my future career.