28/08/2026
Ambassador Highlight: Meet Uswa Ashfaque - Asia/APEC chapter
Uswa is a Principal AI Engineer and Creative Lead at RareSense Inc., a New York-based applied AI research lab, working across generative AI, engineering, product, and creative technology.
Coming from a physics background, Uswa has worked across many of the layers that make AI systems actually work, from AI training, annotation, and data engineering to AI architecture, frontend products, and production generative AI. Her experience has crossed apparel, accessories, and jewelry.
Much of her current work centers on FormaNova, an AI platform built specifically for the jewelry industry. Jewelry is one of the harder products to get right with generative AI. Change a prong, alter a gemstone, shift the scale by a few millimeters, or modify a setting, and an image can look beautiful while no longer representing the product a customer is actually buying.
Her work goes beyond AI image generation. She works across applied AI for photography, virtual try-on, jewelry ideation, and AI-assisted CAD, while also exploring practical AI applications across customer experience, sales, marketing, inventory, pricing, operations, and demand forecasting. Her physics background has also carried directly into the technology, where she has developed physics-informed mathematical methods to measure and verify jewelry fidelity.
There is also another side to her work. Uswa is a traditional painter and sketch artist with years of experience in visual creation. Before generative AI became part of her professional work, she created artboards and visual concepts for international creative teams. Today, she brings those creative instincts together with scientific and engineering thinking.
Her philosophy is simple: humans are in charge of AI. AI can accelerate work, make new capabilities accessible, and open creative possibilities, but taste, responsibility, direction, and final judgment remain human. For Uswa, the goal is not to use AI simply because it is available, but to turn it into something responsible and useful enough to solve real problems in production.
As a SHE IS AI Ambassador, Uswa hopes to encourage more young women and young people to learn how AI actually works, use it responsibly, and see themselves not only as consumers of this technology, but as people who can build it, question it, improve it, and help shape where it goes next.
