The head of Google's commercial operations in the Western Hemisphere this week spoke with the soon-to-be largest ad spender in the United States and one of Hollywood's biggest movie studios, to showcase how large traditional media companies are transitioning to digital marketing. On stage at CES 2017, a trio of executives from the companies also discussed the challenge of managing disparate marketing metrics and fears related to machine learning. AT&T and Universal Pictures currently spend 30 percent of their marketing budgets on digital media, according to Fiona Carter, chief brand officer of AT&T, and Josh Goldstine, president of worldwide marketing at Universal Pictures. Margo Georgiadis, president of Americas at Google, is enthusiastic about the increase in digital spending (especially when the dollars land in Google's coffers) but she said it's more difficult today for marketers to understand the value of their spend as the number of consumer touchpoints -- mobile, web, app, social and video -- grows. The rise of digital outlets and their corresponding marketing metrics makes it nearly impossible to prove the ultimate value of a brand, according to Carter.

Machine learning used to take place behind the scenes: Amazon mined your clicks and purchases for recommendations, Google mined your searches for ad placement, and Facebook mined your social network to choose which posts to show you. But now machine learning is on the front pages of newspapers, and the subject of heated debate. Learning algorithms drive cars, translate speech, and win at Jeopardy! What can and can't they do? Are they the beginning of the end of privacy, work, even the human race?

Most of our editors eschewed the typical New Year's Eve celebrations and arrived in Las Vegas on New Year's Day. One of us even arrived on December 31st and spent the last few hours of 2016 in bed. All of that just to give our all to the annual tradition that is CES. We spent the past few days walking the show floor, attending evening events and covering press conferences just to bring you the very best from CES 2017. And now, we're ready to unveil the finalists for our annual Best of CES awards. Below you'll find our selections for 15 categories, which range from accessibility tech to wearables. We'll announce our category winners tomorrow, which is also when we'll reveal the recipient of our Best of the Best award, the most coveted prize of them all. That special award is selected from our pool of category winners. If you want your voice heard too -- and who doesn't? -- there's an additional category for People's Choice, where you can vote for your favorite entry in our compilation of finalists. Just head on over to our poll right here to cast your ballot. All award winners will be announced at a special ceremony tomorrow at our CES stage, so be sure to come back right here on Engadget around 5PM PT / 8PM ET Saturday to watch it all unfold.

Wallpaper-thin TVs, drones that can dive underwater, and a computer the size of a credit card. Those are only a few of the gadgets that have been unveiled this week at the annual CES gadget expo in Las Vegas, where companies in the tech, automotive, and home appliance industries flaunt their latest innovations. Many high-profile tech companies, like Apple and Google, typically hold their own separate events throughout the year to unveil new products rather than debuting new wares at CES. Still, the annual convention, now in its 50th year, often provides a look at the next big trends in tech. The biggest themes at CES this year include self-driving cars, home robots, and tons of integrations with Amazon's Alexa voice assistant.

Artificial Intelligence is firmly in its mainstream moment and is becoming so embedded in the everyday that we risk not noticing it at all. Self-driving cars, humanoid robots and Go grand masters may grab the popular imagination, but it's the way that AI is seeping into everything from voice recognition to fast food delivery that better illustrates its quiet ubiquity. Alexa and Siri don't just seem to be getting smarter, they are getting smarter, day by day, along with most other connected devices. In the domain of digital advertising, predictive models and machine learning have been with us for several years now, used both to combat ad fraud and to improve campaign goal optimisation, whether that's customer lifetime value or video viewability. Neural networks and deep learning have the scope not only to improve these sorts of capabilities but also to introduce novel ones.

It may not be as entertaining as dueling robots, but the never ending argument between two Google Home assistants is causing an online stir. The'Waiting for Godot' robots, named Vladimir and Estragon after the characters in Samuel Beckett's play, are exchanging words live on streaming service Twitch regarding their likes, dislikes, careers, what clothes they are wearing and more. The pair, described by their creators as '2 autonomous bots contemplating existence,' even touch on their own mortality, as Vladimir knows he is an AI, while Estragon is sure she is a human who enjoys eating waffles. The two Google Home AIs are exchanging words in a live stream. Named Vladimir and Estragon, one of them knows it is an AI, while the other believes it is a human - they also start flirting in the live video.

A TV news report in San Diego about the child that accidentally ordered a dollhouse via Amazon's Alexa inadvertently set off some viewers' Echo devices, which in turn tried to order dollhouses using Alexa. The Amazon Echo devices connect to the Alexa voice assistant, which can be used to stream music, control smart home devices, and notably, order products. CW6 News Morning Anchor Jim Patton was discussing the Dallas 6-year-old who accidentally ordered a $170 dollhouse and cookies via Alexa. "I love the little girl, saying'Alexa ordered me a dollhouse,'" he said during the Thursday report, according to CW6. When Patton mentioned Alexa and the dollhouse, CW6 said that viewers all over San Diego complained that their Echo devices had attempted to order dollhouses.

"Hidden Figures," a movie about three African-American women pioneers at NASA, was slated for worldwide release Friday. The story of the women who calculated flight trajectories that helped John Glenn become the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth previously opened in a limited release on Christmas. The film, which has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 91 percent and will expand to 2,300 theaters Friday, is a historical comedy-drama based on a nonfiction book published by Margot Lee Shetterly in 2016. The characters' work with NASA aided in the launch of Project Mercury in the late 50s and early 60s, and the 1969 Apollo 11 flight. Some who have watched the film said it accurately portrayed what happened in history, like Johnson, who said it "sounded very, very accurate" after watching the film's advance screening in November.

Courtesy of Funimation, the Mamoru Oshii directed Ghost in the Shell anime movie from 1995 will be briefly coming back to movie theaters at the start of February. Launched in select U.S. theaters on February 7th and 8th, if you are at all a fan of the movie then you really need to see this on the big screen. The choice of Mamoru Oshii and his team back in the 90's to adapt Masamune Shirow's manga of Ghost in the Shell was definitely an interesting one. However, after intricate and subtle films like Patlabor 2, having the same team come up with a modern tale of cyberpunk intrigue made a good deal of sense. Due to the nature of film, much of the exposition in the manga had to be skipped, specifically that of the artificially intelligent Fuchikomas.

A machine learning system turns poetry into song by composing a pop music score to suit the lyrics it's given. "I was studying singing while I was doing my PhD in computer science," says Margareta Ackerman at San Jose State University in California, who developed the system with David Loker at technology advisory firm Orbitwerks. "Over time, I started to think of computers as creative partners instead of tools, which could maybe help me write songs." The system, called ALYSIA, processes short lines of text and associates each syllable with a musical note. It chooses the pairing based on features including the syllable's position in the word and how it will fit with the previous five notes.