The Metamorphosis (of RAM(3)S)

The real-time analysis of Big Data streams is a terrific resource for transforming data into value. For this, Big Data technologies for smart processing of massive data streams are available, but the facilities they offer are often too raw to be effectively exploited by analysts. RAM(3)S (Real-time Analysis of Massive MultiMedia Streams) is a framework that acts as a middleware software layer between multimedia stream analysis techniques and Big Data streaming platforms, so as to facilitate the implementation of the former on top of the latter. RAM(3)S has been proven helpful in simplifying the deployment of non-parallel techniques to streaming platforms, such as Apache Storm or Apache Flink. In this paper, we show how RAM(3)S has been updated to incorporate novel stream processing platforms, such as Apache Samza, and to be able to communicate with different message brokers, such as Apache Kafka. Abstracting from the message broker also provides us with the ability to pipeline several RAM(3)S instances that can, therefore, perform different processing tasks. This represents a richer model for stream analysis with respect to the one already available in the original RAM(3)S version. The generality of this new RAM(3)S version is demonstrated through experiments conducted on three different multimedia applications, proving that RAM(3)S is a formidable asset for enabling efficient and effective Data Mining and Machine Learning on multimedia data streams.