Abstract: In the field of neuroscience, accurately mapping the complex three-dimensional (3D) neural circuitry and architecture of the brain is crucial for advancing our understanding of brain functions and disorders. In this study, we introduce a distributed computational pipeline designed for processing high-resolution mouse brain tile images captured by TissueCyte. This pipeline efficiently and accurately […]

Abstract: Blockchain technology has attracted a significant amount of attention ever since the Bitcoin blockchain's success. Currently, most of the research and engineering efforts have been centered around monetary transactions such as token exchange protocols. The potential of building databases on top of blockchains is largely overlooked and remains an open problem. The literature on blockchain databases is divided into permissioned blockchains and permissionless account-based blockchains. However, the former is not fully decentralized, and the latter suffers from challenges in performance and cost. We propose SpendableDB, a permissionless UTxO-based blockchain database as a novel approach to the problem of data decentralization. Our design integrates data into individual UTxOs to achieve true decentralization of data ownership that can be securely transferred and traded, similar to how the regular monetary UTxOs are protected by the underlying blockchain's decentralization protocol. Additionally, SpendableDB provides cryptographically secured data integrity and immutable data lineage that can be easily verified. Our implementation and experiments show that our design is economically practical as it incurs a small amount of blockchain transaction fees. Bio: Yinan Zhou is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at UC Irvine. His primary research focus is on blockchain infrastructure and application developments.