Financial management of construction projects and organisations (cash flow, cost control, budgeting, cost modelling, etc.) Contracts and procurements (incentive based contracts, payment and pricing systems, innovative procurement routes) Business management (Lean construction, benchmarking, process mapping and re-engineering) Information technology and management (management information systems, computer vision, photogrammetry, automated data capture).

Professor Kaka graduated in 1986 with an Honours degree in Civil Engineering at Salford University. He worked briefly in the construction industry before undertaking postgraduate research in Construction Financial Management at the University of Loughborough. On completion of his PhD in 1990, he joined Liverpool University as a lecturer, and was involved in a wide range of research and course development projects. In 2000, he joined Heriot-Watt University as a Professor of Construction Economics and Management. In 2008, he was granted the William Watson Chair of Building Engineering and the shortly after that he joined the Dubai campus as Deputy Head. In 2010 he became Head of Campus and the Vice Principal (Dubai), which is the position he currently holds.Professor AP Kaka has an international reputation for research on the assessment, planning and control of construction projects. Author of more than a hundred research papers, he has held numerous funded research grants with impact demonstrated by the extent of citation and direct industrial application. For example, the Corporate Planning Model for Construction Organisations (developed as a result of two EPSRC funded research projects) is currently being applied in a large construction organisation. The standard cost commitment benchmarks I developed for different types of construction projects have been used by the industry and software companies (e.g. FinCash by CSIRO). The work on the development of cost/duration models has triggered off a series of other international studies (in Hong Kong, Malaysia and India) to benchmark project time performance in different countries against the UK.