# Daniel Whitenack

> Daniel Whitenack is a Lafayette, Indiana-based data scientist, founder and CEO of Prediction Guard, and co-creator and co-host of the Practical AI podcast. Trained in physics at Purdue University, he has worked on reproducible data infrastructure, low-resource language technology, developer education, and private AI deployment. He is also the author of Machine Learning With Go.

- **Role:** Founder and CEO at Prediction Guard; co-creator and co-host at Practical AI
- **Organizations:** Prediction Guard, Practical AI, SIL International (former), Pachyderm (former), Purdue University, Marshall, Gerstein & Borun (former)
- **Education:** B.S., Engineering Physics, Colorado School of Mines, Ph.D., Physics, Purdue University
- **Known for:** Purdue Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship recipient, listed for 2012-13., Author of Machine Learning With Go, first published in 2017., Co-created and co-hosts Practical AI, launched in July 2018.

## Career timeline

- **2012** — Completed doctoral work in physics at Purdue University on density functional resonance theory.
- **2015** — An archived Marshall, Gerstein & Borun biography identifies him as a patent agent working on electrical and software engineering inventions.
- **2016** — Presented Go for Data Science at GopherCon and published Data science gophers with O’Reilly.
- **2017** — Worked at Pachyderm and published Machine Learning With Go.
- **2018** — Practical AI published its inaugural episode on July 2, with Whitenack and Chris Benson as hosts.
- **2020** — Co-authored research with the Masakhane community on African-language machine translation.
- **2021** — Described building shared research workflows for SIL International’s growing AI and NLP teams.
- **2023** — Published a guide to comparing large language models by access, licensing, size, context length, and language or domain.
- **2024** — Co-authored GUIDE, a paper on semantic-domain dictionaries for low-resource languages.
- **2025** — Prediction Guard announced a $3.7 million seed round led by Sovereign’s Capital on May 13.
- **2026** — Continued leading Prediction Guard and co-hosting Practical AI as the show reached episode 377 in October.

## Achievements

- Purdue Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship recipient, listed for 2012-13.
- Author of Machine Learning With Go, first published in 2017.
- Co-created and co-hosts Practical AI, launched in July 2018.
- Contributed to collaborative research on African-language machine translation and low-resource dictionaries.
- Founder and CEO of Prediction Guard, which announced $3.7 million in seed funding in May 2025.
- Maintained the Go kernel for Jupyter and published public AI workshop materials.

## Latest updates

- **2026-10** — Practical AI published episode 377, Exploit Development, Agentic Vulnerability Discovery, and Fake PoCs, on October 22.
- **2026-10** — Current public company biography identifies Whitenack as CEO and founder of Prediction Guard; the company describes its focus as operational control of AI agents.

## Links

- Website: https://datadan.io/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielwhitenack/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/dwhitena
- GitHub: https://github.com/dwhitena

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/daniel-whitenack
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-23