ABSTRACT
Information is spread as individuals engage with other users in the underlying social network. Analysis of social engagements can therefore provide insights to understand the motivation behind how and why users engage with others in different activities. In this study, we aim to understand the driving factors behind four engagement types in Twitter, namely like, reply, retweet, and quote. We extensively analyze a diverse set of features that reflect user behaviors, as well as tweet attributes and semantics by natural language processing, including a deep learning language model, BERT. The performance of these features is assessed in a supervised task of engagement prediction by learning social engagements from over 14 million multilingual tweets. In the light of our experimental results, we find that users would engage with tweets based on text semantics and contents regardless of tweet author, yet popular and trusted authors could be important for reply and quote. Users who actively liked and retweeted in the past are likely to maintain this type of behavior in the future, while this trend is not seen in more complex types of engagements, reply, and quote. Moreover, users do not necessarily follow the behavior of other users with whom they have previously engaged. We further discuss the social insights obtained from the experimental results to understand better user behavior and social engagements in online social networks. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13278-022-00872-1.
ABSTRACT
Laser nerve stimulation using near-infrared laser irradiation has recently been studied in the peripheral nervous system as an alternative method to conventional electrical nerve stimulation. Bringing this method to the vagus nerve model could leverage this emerging stimulation approach to be tested in broader preclinical applications. Here, we report the capability of the laser nerve stimulation method on the rat vagus nerve bundle with a 1505-nm diode laser operated in continuous-wave mode. Studies of the stimulation threshold and laser-induced acute thermal injury to the nerve bundle were also performed to determine a temperature window for safe, reliable and reproducible laser stimulation of the rat vagus nerve bundle. The results show that laser stimulation of the vagus nerve bundle provides reliable and reproducible nerve stimulation in a rat model. These results also confirm a threshold temperature of >42°C with acute nerve damage observed above 46°C. A strong correlation was obtained between the laser time required to raise the nerve temperature above the stimulation threshold and the mean arterial pressure response. Advantages of the method such as non-contact delivery of external stimulus signals at mm scaled distance in air, enhanced spatial selectivity and electrical artefact-free measurements may indicate its potential to counteract the side effects of conventional electrical vagus nerve stimulation.
