Research Areas:
Data mining; Pattern recognition and classification; Fuzzy sets applications; Problem solving paradigms; Creativity in Arts and Science; Decision Analysis

Academic Positions:
IIM Bangalore: 1990- present
Guest Faculty, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, August 1995- November 1995
Faculty, XIME, Bangalore, India, August 1996
Guest Faculty, National Institute of Bank Management, Pune, India, March 1995
Visiting Faculty, St. Josephs's College of Business Administration, 1984- 1986
Visiting Faculty, Maharishi Institute of Management, Bangalore, India, April 1997, May 1998

Other Assignments:
Senior Engineer, Bharat Electronics, Bangalore, India, 1982- 1984
Systems Analyst, AMCO Batteries, Bangalore, India, 1982
Systems Analyst, ETC Computer Centre, Bangalore, India, 1981
Executive Engineer, Indian Telephone Industries, Bangalore, India, 1975-1976 & 1978-1980
Invited Lecturer on Creativity, Thinking paradigms and Problem solving at academic and professional institutions across the country
Member - Program committees of International conferences on Artificial Intelligence, Applied Computing

Professional Leadership:
Member - Governing Council, PSNA College of Engineering and Technology, Dindigul, Tamil Nadu, India
Joint Editor-in-Chief of Dharana-Bhavan's International Journal of Business (Published by Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bangalore)
Innovations:
- Pioneered a Graduate-Level course on Creative Elements in Arts and Science, a study of Creative patterns in music, cinema, drawings and literature, and insights in Science
- Pioneered a Graduate-Level course on Thinking Paradigms featuring heuristic, lateral, holistic, systems and logical thinking

Awards:
"Shiksha Ratan Puraskar" for 2011 conferred by India International Friendship Society, New Delhi, India
"Best Teacher in Management Award (Southern Region)" for 2008 conferred by The Deccan Herald (Leading newspaper in Karnataka), Bangalore, India
"Distinguished Alumnus Award (for Academic Excellence)" for 2007 conferred by The National Institute of Technology (formerly Regional Engineering College), Tiruchirappalli, India
Listed in Marquis - "Who's Who in the World", "Who's Who in Asia", "Who's Who in Science and Engineering"

Significant Publications:

1. Rajesh Natarajan and B. Shekar, "Tightness: A Novel Heuristic and a Clustering Mechanism to Improve the Interpretation of Association Rules," Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration (IRI 2008), Las Vegas, U.S.A., (July 2008)

2. Rajesh Natarajan and B.Shekar, "Understandability of Association Rules: A Heuristic Measure to Enhance Rule Quality," Quality Measures in Data Mining (Ed. F. Guillet and H. Hamilton), Springer Verlag Series on Computational Intelligence, 43, pp.179-203, 2007

3. B.Shekar and Rajesh Natarajan, "A Framework for Evaluating Knowledge-Based Interestingness of Association Rules," Fuzzy Optimization and Decision Making, 3, pp.157 - 185 (June 2004)

4. Pankaj Kulshreshta and B.Shekar: "Interrelationships Among Fuzzy Preference-based Choice Functions and Significance of Rationality Conditions: A Taxonomic and Intuitive Perspective," Fuzzy Sets and Systems, Vol.109, No.3, pp.429-445 (October 1999)

5. B.Shekar and Rajesh Natarajan, "A Transaction-based Neighbourhood-driven Approach to Quantifying Interestingness of Association Rules," Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining 2004, Brighton, U.K., pp.194-201 (December 2004)

6. Rajesh Natarajan and B.Shekar, "A Relatedness-based Data-driven Approach to Determination of Interestingness of Association Rules," Proceedings of the 20th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2005), Santa Fe, U.S.A., pp.551-552 (March 2005)

7. B.Shekar and Rajesh Natarajan, "Investigations into Relatedness-based Interestingness of Association Rules: A Transaction-driven Analysis, " Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE, International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration (IRI 2006), Hawaii, U.S.A., pp.522-527 (September 2006)