Nicolas Cointe

About me

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My PhD topic was the design of a conceptual framework to represent and use collective ethics in multiagent systems — a question that, at the time, had mostly been studied from an agent-centered perspective only. The model I developed gives an agent an internal representation of another agent’s ethics and mental states, similar to a theory of mind, so that it can form a judgment the way a person reasoning about someone else’s intentions would. The aim throughout was to define the various notions of ethics and moral philosophy precisely enough to represent a wide range of theories, and to build an ethics-based cooperation framework on top of that.

This approach centers on rational, cognitive agents with an explicit representation of morals and ethics through a set of moral values, rules and ethical principles, folded into a judgment process built as an extension of the classic BDI architecture.

This thesis was funded by the Agence Nationale pour la Recherche and the EthicAa project (Ethics and Autonomous Agents).

In 2018 I spent six months as a postdoc in cybersecurity, part of the SAS Department (Secured Architectures and Systems — Systèmes et Architectures Sécurisés) at École des Mines de Saint-Étienne, in collaboration with the THD team at Télécom SudParis.

From August 2018 to January 2021, as a member of the BEHAVE project at TU Delft (The Netherlands), I explored new ways to model decision-making and multiagent cooperation mechanisms, including obfuscation-based decision making and moral institutions.

In February 2021, I joined Capgemini Engineering as a Consultant, working mainly on innovation for the biopharmaceutical sector — developing and integrating Industry 4.0 concepts such as digital twins, data contextualization, virtual reality and cosimulation.

The years since have shifted my focus from hands-on innovation to shaping how that kind of work gets proposed and delivered. I’m now a Certified Architect at Capgemini, framing the technical and financial dimensions of client offers during presales and staying close enough to delivery to know whether what we propose can actually be built on time and within budget. Before an idea makes it into a proposal, I still like to prototype and test the concept myself — it’s the fastest way to tell a real risk from an imagined one, and it’s what lets me have an honest, trustful conversation with a client rather than a merely optimistic one.

I also work on developing Capgemini’s partnership ecosystem — building relationships with software editors and subcontractors so that what we bring to clients draws on the best available building blocks, not only what we could build in-house. Alongside that client-facing work, I’ve taken on management responsibilities focused on growing talent within the company, formalized through Capgemini’s “Connected Manager” certification in 2023 (see below).

Since 2020, I have also been a member of the French Corps des Maîtres de Conférences (qualification number 20227343167).

Diplomas, degrees and certifications

Hobbies

Potential conflicts of interest

For transparency and ethics purpose, here is the list of companies I have some shares or any kind of private interest in:

Updated Sept 13 2026