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Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending, which makes borrowers and investors meet directly through online platforms bypassing traditional financial institutions, is an emerging financing market after the traditional financial institutions crushed during the global financial crisis from 2007 to 2009. P2P lending platforms meet the credit demand more efficiently and play a vital role for the credit market and economic activity. This study sheds light on whether the credit spread of P2P lending is well predictive of economic activity compared to the bond credit spread which has been fully investigated in prior studies. Our findings show that the P2P credit spread performs similarly in predicting the economic activity as bond credit spread only during the financial crisis. However, the predictive power of P2P credit spread becomes inverse during the noncrisis periods since P2P lending platforms provide an alternative and easier financing channel to individuals who hardly borrow money for refinancing from traditional financial institutions. This study highlights the alternative role of P2P lending platform in financing and provides the evidence of different predictive powers of P2P credit spread on economic activity in different time periods.

This paper aims to propose a numerical definition-based systematic design approach (NDSDA) to generate an explicit numerical definition of the product form profile and to establish the correlation between the product form features and the corresponding consumers’ image perceptions.

To illustrate the feasibility of the proposed method, this study considers the design of a two-dimensional automobile profile for illustration purposes and commences by developing a detailed numerical definition of an automobile profile using Bézier curves. A series of automobile image evaluations are conducted to examine the relationship between the characteristics of an automobile profile and its associated consumer image perception. Finally, the evaluation results are analyzed statistically, and the statistical results are used to construct mathematical models formalizing the correlations between the automobile profile design variables and the consumers’ perceptions of the product image.

The results of the evaluation trials are used to construct mathematical models capable of predicting the likely consumer response to any automobile profile designed in accordance with the numerical definition. Furthermore, the evaluation data enable the critical design variables and form features to be determined such that the efficacy of the design process in creating automobiles which better meet the consumers’ image aspirations can be improved.

The major contribution of the NDSDA methodology presented in this study is the ability it gives to designers to specify the product form in a detailed yet highly efficient manner. Furthermore, the numerical definition of the product form not only provides a suitable basis for identifying the critical design variables and form features of the product but also provides an understanding of how these variables should be manipulated to obtain or reinforce the desired product image.

In real-time entertainment processing applications, processing of the multiple data streams demands high efficient multiple transfers, which leads to the computational overhead for system-on-chip (SoC), which runs the artificial intelligence algorithms. High-performance direct memory access controller (DMAC) is incorporated in SoC to perform the multiple data transfers without the participation of main processors. But achieving the area-efficient and power-aware DMAC suitable for streaming the multiple data remains to be a daunting challenge among the researchers.

The purpose of this paper to provide the DMA operations without intervention of central processing unit (CPU) for bulk video data transmissions.

The proposed DMAC has been developed based on the hybrid advanced extensible interface (AXI)-PCI bus subsystem to handle the multiple data streams from the video sources. The proposed model consists of bus selector module, user control signal, status register, DMA-supported address and AXI-PCI subsystems to achieve better performance in analysing the video frames.

The extensive experimentation is carried out with Xilinx Zynq SoC architecture using Very High Speed integrated circuit hardware description language (VHDL) programming, and performance metrics such as utilization area and power are calculated and compared with the other existing DMA controllers such as Scatter-DMA, Gather-DMA and Enhanced DMA. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DMAC has outperformed other existing DMAC in terms of less area, less delay and power, which makes the proposed model suitable for streaming multiple video streams.