Google Colab, or Colaboratory, is a cloud-based Jupyter notebook environment that facilitates data science and machine learning projects. It requires no setup, making it accessible for users to write and execute Python code directly in their web browsers. This platform is particularly popular for its integration with various machine learning libraries, such as TensorFlow and PyTorch, and it supports GPU usage for free, which is beneficial for computationally intensive tasks ¹⁴.

Colab allows users to create, share, and collaborate on notebooks, similar to how Google Docs operates. Users can import datasets from various sources, including Google Drive and GitHub, and document their code with mathematical equations. This makes it an excellent tool for both learning and developing machine learning applications ⁴.

Overall, Google Colab has become a standard tool in academia and industry for teaching and practicing machine learning and data science due to its user-friendly features and accessibility ⁴.