Founder · Ethicos AI

Cosmin Badea.

AI safety researcher, Imperial College lecturer, and the founder of Ethicos AI.

Based
London. Working internationally.
Direct
cos@ethicos.co.uk
Profile
cbadea.com ↗

Cosmin Badea · London

Building the frameworks that let AI systems decide well — and the institutions that hold them up.

Cosmin's research builds explicit, logic-based frameworks for value-aligned decision-making, with a particular focus on interpretability for moral AI. His PhD work at Imperial College London (under Prof Marek Sergot) developed MARS, the Multi-valued Action Reasoning System, for agents that deliberate over moral rules explicitly rather than learning them implicitly.

He lectures on Contemporary Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence at Imperial, where he previously designed and led the first AI and Ethics course in the Department of Computing. He has supervised MEng and MSc research on moral AI and AI safety; several student projects have led to peer-reviewed publications.

On EU-funded Horizon programmes he leads AI and ethics on 4P-CAN, a €5.3M personalised-oncology consortium of 17 organisations across 11 countries, and serves as Chief AI Officer at FH-EARLY, a clinical early-diagnosis consortium. He is the architect of Project Nightingale, an AI-for-Good initiative focused on health and wellbeing. His published work appears in Nature Machine Intelligence, AI and Ethics, BMC Medical Ethics and elsewhere.

Outside Ethicos, he sits on advisory boards and review panels for AI ethics journals, research consortia and academic programmes. He works in English and Romanian, and reads German, French and Greek for research.

01 / Positions & consortia

Currently held positions, and the work they involve.

2024 → Founder & Director Ethicos AI LTD. Specialist AI ethics, governance, strategy, training and research advisory. Consultancy
2023 → Lecturer in AI & Philosophy Imperial College London. Contemporary Philosophy and AI; previously designed and led the first AI & Ethics course in the Department of Computing. Academic
2025 → Chief AI & Ethics Officer 4P-CAN · €5.3M EU Horizon consortium for personalised oncology. 17 organisations across 11 countries. Consortium lead
2025 → Chief AI Officer FH-EARLY · clinical early-diagnosis consortium. AI strategy, ethics oversight and dissemination. Consortium lead
2024 → Architect & Lead Project Nightingale. An AI-for-Good initiative focused on health and wellbeing, run as a research-led programme alongside clinical and academic partners. Initiative
Ongoing Reviewer Board AI and Ethics (Springer). Peer review for the journal across philosophy, governance and applied AI ethics. Editorial
MARS

Framework · PhD work, Imperial

The Multi-valued Action Reasoning System — an explicit, logic-based architecture for agents that reason about moral rules under uncertainty.

Why it matters

An AI system that can show its working.

Most modern AI infers values implicitly from training data and produces outputs no one can audit at the level of reasoning. MARS takes the opposite stance: rules and values are stated, weighed and combined in an inspectable structure, so a regulator, a clinician or a court can ask not only what the system did but why.

The framework underpins Ethicos AI's specialist advisory work on moral reasoning, decision-making under uncertainty, and interpretability for high-stakes deployment — in healthcare, in public-sector AI, and in any system whose decisions need to hold up to scrutiny.

Read the academic write-up

03 / Advisory

A small number of advisory seats each year.

Outside Ethicos AI's project engagements, Cosmin takes on a deliberately limited number of board, advisory and fractional roles each year — chosen for the seriousness of the question and the calibre of the people asking it.

Typical formats: non-executive director on technology and clinical-AI boards, fractional Chief AI / Ethics Officer for companies deploying AI at scale, investment-committee advisor for funds with serious AI exposure, and private briefings for principals, family offices and senior philanthropic programmes.

All enquiries are read personally and answered within a week. Conversations are confidential by default.

Currently open to discuss

Board & NED Tech, clinical AI, deeptech
Fractional C-level Chief AI / Ethics Officer
Funds & due diligence AI exposure, IC advisory
Private briefings Principals · family offices
Speaking Boards · investor events · academic
Open a confidential conversation

cos@ethicos.co.uk · London