MEMS storage devices are new non-volatile secondary storages that have outstanding advantages over magnetic disks. MEMS storage devices, however, are much different from magnetic disks in the structure and access characteristics in the following ways. They have thousands of heads called probe tips and provide the following two major access facilities: (1) flexibility : freely selecting a set of probe tips for accessing data, (2) parallelism: simultaneously reading and writing data with the set of probe tips selected. Due to these characteristics, it is nontrivial to find data placements that fully utilize the capability of MEMS storage devices. In this paper, we propose a simple logical model called the Region-Sector (RS) model that abstracts major characteristics affecting data retrieval performance, such as flexibility and parallelism, from the physical MEMS storage model. We also suggest heuristic data placement strategies based on the RS model. To show the usability of the RS model, we derive new data placements for relational data and two-dimensional spatial data by using these strategies. Experimental results show that the proposed data placements improve the data retrieval performance by up to 4.7 times for relational data and by up to 18.7 times for two-dimensional spatial data of approximately 320 Mbytes compared with those of existing data placements. Further, these improvements are expected to be more marked as the database size grows.

A multi-agent object attention system is proposed, which is based on biologically inspired attractor selection model. Object attention is facilitated by using a video sequence and a depth map obtained through a compound-eye image sensor TOMBO. Robustness of the multi-agent system over environmental changes is enhanced by utilizing the biological model of adaptive response by attractor selection. To implement the proposed system, an efficient VLSI architecture is employed with reducing enormous computational costs and memory accesses required for depth map processing and multi-agent attractor selection process. According to the FPGA implementation result of the proposed object attention system, which is accomplished by using 7,063 slices, 640512 pixel input images can be processed in real-time with three agents at a rate of 9 fps in 48 MHz operation.