How we built a machine learning and data science community at Microsoft

In 2012, few people at Microsoft outside of research were working on or talking about machine learning and artificial intelligence, and "data scientist" was not an official job title. Fast-forward eight years, and we have hundreds of data scientists and thousands of engineers building ML and AI into products and services. To help support these employees, we have a thriving 7,000-person internal machine learning community where our employees learn, share, and connect with one another. Here's how we got there. Some might approach the notion of community as a platform or a piece of technology.