TCS iON, a strategic unit of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), inaugurated its artificial intelligence (AI) driven command centre in Chennai that can monitor more than 6,000 of its unique examination venues across the country, in real-time.

By layering a digital monitoring platform on the newly developed physical infrastructure, TCS iON aims to provide a superior experience to exam administrators for the fair conduct of exams along with transparency of the exam operations. Based at TCS’ Sholinganallur facility, the command centre has the following features:

• Monitoring the exam process through a set of over 150 parameters to prevent, predict and post incidents as alerts for efficient management of the exam

• Tracking the movement and the devices carried by every candidate at any exam centre via a live CCTV feed

• Predicting the readiness of the centre based on past incidents and the current live feed of events in the exam centre

• Issuing alerts about any malpractice attempts based on the learnings from the malpractice patterns of the past

• Tracking the readiness of all devices being used for conducting the exam, by leveraging TCS’ IoT framework

The command centre is engineered to empower TCS iON and its customers to issue proactive automated directions for any observations that warrant immediate action, through instant alerts against anomalies like exam interruptions, unusual behavior on server or candidate systems and the performance of devices being used for the exam process.

The TCS iON command centre is also equipped with a remote energy management solution, which monitors critical power parameters during assessments. Sensors collect real-time data and the temperature of servers and UPS rooms, thereby allowing near real-time monitoring and data analytics for preventive maintenance. This solution will issue instant notifications highlighting critical events for early fault detection, therefore enabling proactive measures to avoid disruption due to power failures or other such issues during exams.

Commenting on the launch, Venguswamy Ramaswamy, global head, TCS iON, said, “The TCS iON Command Center @ Chennai is truly a benchmark for real-time monitoring of multiple events during high-stake exams. This is our next leap to reimagine the exam monitoring process and assure fair and free exams at scale, even in the remotest locations within and outside India. This is aligned to our vision of making examination processes in the country secure and scalable. The real-time monitoring of the end-to-end examination process has been made possible through an interplay of digital technologies covering cloud, analytics, artificial intelligence driven algorithms, IoT frameworks and other high-end computational and image processing algorithms. By providing such 360-degree assurance, we aim to raise the bar for monitoring large scale exams.”