Use tensorflow model API in Google Colaboratory

Introduction

This posts shows an alternative to run tensorflow, which is using the free google Colaboratory platform. You can run both the CPU and GPU versions there.

I’ve had a hard time to make tensorflow run on my Windows PC. I was able to install it successfully, but whenever I execute import tensorflow as tf in my python, I got errors saying “DLL file not found”. I was able to use tensorflow 1.1.0 successfully before, but new versions seem to have this issue all the time. There is a fix now, please refer to my new post titled “Install Tensorflow (CPU) in PyCharm in Windows”.

I gave up on installing tensorflow on my Windows PC, and tried to seek some alternatives. I figured out google Colaboratory could faciliate my learning, so I gave it a try, and it works pretty well.

Two things of interest to me are:

How do I import other third party and custom packages in google colab?
How do I read large numbers of data files from google drive?

Please feel free to contribute if you want.