Information Systems and Operations Management Area

Costello alum prepares to compete at Southeast Asian Games

Katelynn C Hipolito — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 20:51:48 +0000

Costello alum prepares to compete at Southeast Asian Games Katelynn C Hipolito Thu, 11/13/2025 - 15:51

Sidney Yap, BS Information Systems Operations Management ‘20, MS Management ‘21, Business Analytics Grad Cert ‘22, MBA ‘25, exemplifies exceptional balance—driving innovative strategies at Navy Federal while representing the Philippines internationally in the hammer throw.

Action shot from 2025 Philippine Athletic Championships. Photo by Philippines Athletic Track and Field Association (PATAFA).

As a student-athlete at ��, he competed in track and field for nearly five years, spanning four Costello College of Business academic programs. In addition to the hammer throw, he also competed in discus and the weight throw, an indoor equivalent to hammer. Not long after he began competing at the university, he began his career as an intern at Navy Federal. Over time, he advanced in athletics, academics, and his career—building a foundation that continues to shape his success today.

Sidney Yap. Photo provided

Now preparing for the 2025 Southeast Asian Games in Thailand this December, Yap is focused on timing his peak performance for competition. Recently promoted to enterprise data analytics consultant at Navy Federal, he starts his day early so that he can focus on his training in the evenings. As busy as he is, he prefers it that way, driven by his passion for athletics, education, and professional growth.

Balancing athletics with his career is nothing new for Yap. While at George Mason, he worked closely with professors, coaches, and managers to coordinate schedules and manage workloads. Starting his career at Navy Federal as an intern during his sophomore year, he recognizes strong parallels between athletics and his business career—both requiring discipline, strategy, and data-driven decisions.

As much as his athletics skills and habits help him in his career, his job at Navy Federal in turn opened the door to this remarkable opportunity to compete in Thailand. At a company luncheon, a manager approached him after learning about his track and field background.

“He hit me with the question—What’s next?” Yap recalls.

Sharing Filipino heritage, the manager offered to help him represent the Philippines. That conversation led to connecting with the national team coach, securing dual citizenship, and obtaining a passport. Since then, he has competed in the Philippine Nationals in 2024 and 2025. Representing his family’s heritage on an international stage adds deeper meaning to his athletic pursuits.

Sidney Yap at his MBA graduation in Spring 2025. Photo provided

Yap is appreciative of the business foundations and location of his alma mater, reflected in his decision to remain at Costello for his undergraduate and graduate programs. Originally from the area, it wasn’t until he started researching colleges to apply to in high school that he learned it was a top-notch school full of opportunity.

At Costello, he experienced being taught by high-level faculty who prepared him to succeed in his current role. One of his first courses was on organizational behavior taught by Victoria Grady, associate professor of management and director of the MS in management program.

“Classes like that help with refinement of your people skills, and I think that goes beyond how you are in the workforce because those organizational behaviors is teaching me, in my mind, how to be a better person with people I interact with in athletics and in public.”

“Classes like that help with refinement of your people skills, and I think that goes beyond how you are in the workforce because those organizational behaviors is teaching me, in my mind, how to be a better person with people I interact with in athletics and in public.”

— Sidney Yap, BS Information Systems Operations Management ‘20, MS Management ‘21, Business Analytics Grad Cert ‘22, MBA ‘25

Yap’s story reflects the unique synergy between academic excellence and athletic discipline forged at George Mason. His years as a student-athlete prepared him to navigate the demands of rigorous coursework, competitive sports, and a growing professional career—all at once. The foundation he built through Costello’s programs continues to guide him as he balances his role at Navy Federal with training for the Southeast Asian Games. As Yap sets his sights on gold in Thailand, he carries the same mindset into his professional journey—proving that excellence isn’t confined to the field but is a pursuit that spans every arena of life.

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George Mason researcher is using AI to identify human trafficking hot spots

Katelynn C Hipolito — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 18:20:46 +0000

George Mason researcher is using AI to identify human trafficking hot spots Katelynn C Hipolito Mon, 09/29/2025 - 14:20

Illicit massage businesses (IMBs) run by human trafficking rings are rampant in the United States. A �� professor has helped build what may be the best artificial intelligence (AI)-driven tool to root them out.

Human trafficking rings are at their most dangerous when they masquerade as legitimate commercial activity. IMBs are one of the most common ways in which exploitive networks operate in plain sight.

The Network, an anti-trafficking nonprofit, estimates that there are more than 13,000 IMBs active in the United States, raking in annual total revenue of more than $5 billion.

Abhishek Ray

“You are stuck in a massage business. You’re not allowed to go out,” says Abhishek Ray, assistant professor of information systems and operations management at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at George Mason, describing the plight of IMB workers. “Your passports are taken away, and you’re supposed to do a certain amount of business every day and give the money to the trafficker. It’s a really abhorrent form of abuse.”

Ray is one of a growing group of researchers exploring how various forms of AI could help resource-constrained law enforcement agencies differentiate between IMBs and the legitimate enterprises they try to mimic. His ongoing research using graph neural networks has yielded more promising results than rival approaches, when put to the test in a recent experiment.

His co-researchers on the IMB project are Lumina Albert and Swetha Varadarajan of Colorado State University.

According to Ray, “Graph neural networks are just a fancy way of saying that if I get a graph of a city or locality at one point in time, and I add data to it, can I predict future patterns on this graph if I know the past?”

This approach made sense for detecting IMBs, because try as they might to appear above board, they have geographical needs that conventional businesses don’t. “IMBs don’t allow their trafficked employees to go out of the parlor,” Ray says. “But since they’re humans, they need sustenance. They have to be near groceries, gas stations, where they can get stuff and come back.”

The researchers combined several graph neural networks into a framework called IMBWatch. The training data-set for IMBWatch comprised publicly available information such as online customer reviews, arrest and raid data for known IMBs, and advertisements from websites promoting illicit activities (e.g., the infamous Backpage). The result, in essence, was a series of snapshots mapping the evolution of the IMB network in a given city or county over a period of time. This could then be overlaid on geographical maps to tease out hidden patterns.

To gauge IMBWatch’s relative performance, the researchers let it loose on a testing data-set alongside four other AI models, which were not as sensitive to the nuanced interplay of spatial and temporal factors. Of the five models, IMBWatch provided the most accurate, precise and informative predictions. In other words, it outperformed the others at spotting IMBs among a larger mass of local businesses.

“Graph neural networks are just a fancy way of saying that if I get a graph of a city or locality at one point in time, and I add data to it, can I predict future patterns on this graph if I know the past?”
— Abhishek Ray, assistant professor of information systems and operations management

While encouraging, these outcomes require further confirmation with a larger data-set. “IMBWatch was trained on data from Georgia and Louisiana, not the entire United States,” Ray says. “These were small, manageable data-sets, but we will now scale up to major states such as New York and California.”

The researchers are also looking at enhancing IMBWatch with data related to how workers end up wandering into trafficking webs. These might include “proximity to hospitals, religious places, etc. because a lot of times people are coerced by religious compulsions, or because they’re pregnant and need some care,” Ray says.

This is not Ray’s first foray into the field of AI-fueled anti-trafficking. Previously, Ray co-developed a model for improving machine learning-based detection of human trafficking activity at transit stations and on fishing vessels.

However, law enforcement agencies and other pertinent stakeholders (e.g., business owners) are often wary of adopting AI-based solutions, due to a lack of trust in the technology. Ray and his co-researchers are currently devising a framework that will clarify how these stakeholders can work together with tech experts and, perhaps most importantly, human trafficking survivors to make the best possible use of AI.

“This qualitative piece is required to make sure that people who are on the sidelines, on the fences about using this actually start using it, because that’s the need right now,” Ray says.

Learn more about Artificial Intelligence at George Mason