METU Faculty of Engineering students Alkım Dömeke, Deniz Karakay, Humeyra Bodur and Murat Kaş, with their eco-friendly electronic cash register project “QRegister,” which they developed with the support of AdımODTÜ and under the consultancy of Asst. Prof. Pelin Angın from the Department of Computer Engineering, has made it to the finals of Google’s worldwide Solution Challenge by being chosen as one of the top 10 projects. After the finalist teams make a live project presentation on August 26, the results of the contest will be announced.
With QRegister, the only project from Turkey to be qualified for the finals, the METU Team aims at reducing the use of paper receipts and thus contribute to a more sustainable future. By bringing the components of hardware, software, and mobile application together, QRegister is designed as an eco-friendly, digital cash register system, which customers can use by scanning the QR code that appears on the screen of the cash register machine during payment. In the QR code, information such as names, barcodes, and amounts of the products as well as the name of the store are all hashed. The mobile application of QRegister creates a digital receipt by using a reverse hash algorithm that reveals the necessary information for it. Since the application can work both online and offline, users can keep these generated receipts both in the cloud or on the device on which the application is installed. The hash algorithm that is used in order to store more information by exceeding the physical limits of the QR code has also been developed by the QRegister Team.
Moreover, this is not the first achievement of the team. Receiving various sponsorships and ranking first in the Hack for the Planet Hackathon organized by Google DSC Turkey are among their previous accomplishments.
Promotional video of QRegister:
About the Contest
Solution Challenge aims at finding solutions to at least one of the 17 global problems, which are put forward by the United Nations, by benefiting from various Google technologies. This is the second time Turkey hosts the event that is organized by Google annually. To participate in the contest, the only requirement is to be a member of a DSC (Developer Student Club). Teams whose projects are qualified for the top 10 in the contest are entitled to receive mentoring support from Google employees in addition to taking part in the Demo Day, which will be broadcast by Google’s official YouTube channel.
