Sydney Padua is a cartoonist and visual effects artist. Her cult webcomic The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, now a bestselling graphic novel, combines extensive research with alternate-universe comic-book escapes, where Babbage's 1840s mechanical computer is finally completed and used to build runaway economic models, defeat spelling errors, and of course, fight crime. Her 3-d animations of how the Analytical Engine would have looked and operated are some of the first visualisations ever created of that extraordinary machine. Her work has been featured in Wired and The Economist and she has spoken at Microsoft, Google, the BBC, and the Computer History Museum.