Training an AI Model Using Google Colab

Tuesday, October 21st

Today I took some time to read through some of my past code in Google Colab, an online, free AI engineering “notebook” where I could test and train data on. Yesterday, I struggled to figure out why I couldn’t install a certain library SimpleITK using pip, a Python package manager: the program kept telling me that the library “couldn’t be found”. That’s when I made a small but crucial edit to it: capitalizing the name.

Before, I had used this command:
!pip install simpleitk

However, the correct command (as I would later use) was:
!pip install SimpleITK

Additionally, I “split up” the install commands, which I believed also contributed to the problem before. What do I mean? In Python, one can install many libraries and modules at once using this notation:
!pip install X Y Z

But when I used that notation, that’s when the error came up, so then after changing that “compound” command so to say into separate lines:
!pip install X
!pip install Y
!pip install Z

The libraries were all fully imported, including SimpleITK!

Thursday, October 23rd

After successfully installing and importing the necessary libraries, I started to work on training the model. This involved a lot of waiting, however, so a problem arose when I figured out that the training sessions would stop working (called a “time out”) after a certain amount amount of time (around 5 minutes?) when the I would stop interacting with the Colab website. So, looking for a solution, I decided to follow a tutorial that implements a bit of JavaScript code inside the website code itself (using Chrome Dev Tools), which would “refresh” the page every minute to prevent timeouts while also maintaining the AI model training process.

Saturday, October 25th

You know how there are “Pro accounts” for a lot of services? Google Colab is no different, and I really wanted the benefits, which included access to more efficient and stronger GPUs and TPUs, as well as a higher usage limit. Unfortunately, it costed money (obviously), which I didn’t want to pay up.

So then, how did I get a Pro account? I used my friend’s GT email to sign up for a free Pro account for “students” attending a college, so after (impersonating) using his email, I got the account with all the benefits!