I graduated! I am now a software engineer at Arbor Networks.

I have begun releasing pieces of my research code as open source. As I finish this process, I will work on writing more thorough documentation and description of how the pieces fit together, but in the meantime, my progress is visible on my GitHub page.

I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan from September 2007 until April 2014, studying under Professors Brian Noble and Jason Flinn. I was a member of the Mobility, Pervasive Computing, and AutoMedia groups here at Michigan. The latter group is a collaboration with Ford Motors, focusing on vehicular and mobile networking.

In my dissertation research, I focused on building programming abstractions to simplify common mobile application tasks, such as making better use of all available networking options, or deciding when and how aggressively to prefetch application content from remote servers.

Occasionally, I will post some of the painful lessons I've learned on my blog, over here. Hopefully this saves someone out there some time and frustration. This started out fairly Android-focused (as was my research), but has since become more general.

From Fall 2012 to Winter 2014, I was a graduate student instructor for EECS 482 (Operating Systems). Before that, I was an undergraduate teaching assistant for EECS 280 (Programming and Data Structures) for four semesters, from Fall 2005 until Winter 2007.

I also attended Michigan for my bachelor's and master's degrees. Michigan is awesome (state and institution).

Publications

The future is cloudy: Reflecting prediction error in mobile applications [abstract] [pdf]
Brett D. Higgins, Kyungmin Lee, T.J. Giuli, Brian Noble, and Christopher Peplin
In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Mobile Computing, Applications, and Services (MobiCASE),
Austin, Texas (November 2014)

Balancing Interactive Performance and Budgeted Resources in Mobile Computing [abstract] [pdf] [defense slides]
Brett D. Higgins
PhD Dissertation (also available here)
Committee: Brian Noble, Jason Flinn (co-chairs), Z. Morley Mao, and Mingyan Liu

Informed Mobile Prefetching [abstract] [pdf] [slides]
Brett D. Higgins, Jason Flinn, T.J. Giuli, Brian Noble, Christopher Peplin, and David Watson
In Proceedings of the 10th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys),
Low Wood Bay, United Kingdom (June 2012)

Intentional Networking: Opportunistic Exploitation of Mobile Network Diversity [abstract] [pdf] [mobile network traces] [slides]
Brett D. Higgins, Azarias Reda, Timur Alperovich, Jason Flinn, T.J. Giuli, Brian Noble, and David Watson
In Proceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom), Chicago, IL (September 2010)

Intentional Networking [poster]
Brett Higgins, Azarias Reda, Timur Alperovich, Jason Flinn, T.J. Giuli, Brian Noble, and David Watson
The 7th Annual Microsoft Research Networking Summit (June 2010)

The Case for Intentional Networking [abstract] [pdf]
Jason Flinn, T.J. Giuli, Brett Higgins, Brian Noble, Azarias Reda and David Watson
The Tenth Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile 2009)

Dsearch: Distributed search for a personal area network [abstract] [pdf]
Garrett Brown, Daniel Fabbri, Brett Higgins and Azarias Reda
Available as University of Michigan Technical Report CSE-TR-549-08, October 30, 2008

Sprockets: Safe extensions for distributed file systems [abstract] [pdf]
Daniel Peek, Edmund B. Nightingale, Brett D. Higgins, Puspesh Kumar, and Jason Flinn
Proceedings of the 2007 USENIX Annual Technical Conference Santa Clara, CA, June 2007.