While the most part of ”big data” systems target text-based analytics, multimedia data, which makes up about 2/3 of internet traffic, provide unprecedented opportunities for understanding and responding to real world situations and challenges. Multimedia Big Data Computing is the new topic that focus on all aspects of distributed computing systems that enable massive scale image and video analytics. During the course of this paper we describe BPEM (Big Picture Event Monitor), a Multimedia Big Data Computing framework that operates over streams of digital photos generated by online communities, and enables monitoring the relationship between real world events and social media user reaction in real-time. As a case example, the paper examines publicly available social media data that relate to the Mobile World Congress 2014 that has been harvested and analyzed using the described system.

Peer Reviewed