Drew Boyuka ‘11 spent his summer in Beijing at the Microsoft Research Asia lab. While in China, he worked on distributed query processing and scheduling in a cloud-computing environment designed to improve the efficiency of large data centers such as those affiliated with Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.

Drew Boyuka ‘11 outside China’s National Stadium in Beijing.

Boyuka plans to extend the project he began this summer into a publication and a master’s thesis. “It’s an ambitious goal, but I have a lot of support from my Park Faculty Mentor, academic advisor, and the researchers at Microsoft,” says Boyuka.

Microsoft Research Asia is the company’s primary research facility in the Asia Pacific region. Since the site opened its doors in 1998, the lab has filed patents in over 1,000 technologies and has produced more than 3,000 academic papers for international journals and conferences. Innovations developed at Microsoft Research Asia have enhanced products such as Windows 7, Xbox, Windows Mobile, and Bing.

During his undergraduate experience, Boyuka, a native of Locust, North Carolina, received numerous awards such as the Computer Science Outstanding Senior Award for Citizenship and Service, the Donald L. Bitzer Creativity Award, and the Future of Engineering Award. Boyuka served as captain of an NC State ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest team, an officer in the Association for Computing Machinery student chapter, and webmaster for Service Raleigh.

This past May, Boyuka completed his bachelor’s degree after three years at NC State, and will graduate with his master’s degree in computer science in May 2011. After graduation, he intends to pursue his Ph.D. in computer science and then begin work in industry as either a researcher or development team member.