Late last month, EMC unveiled an alliance with the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. EMC will pay $200,000 a year for the next three years for insider access to the lab’s research.

The company has also opened a new research center in Cambridge where EMC engineers will team up with computer scientists from MIT and other Boston-area universities. And EMC is joining with MIT, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Boston University, and Cisco Systems Inc. to build a $100 million advanced data center in Holyoke.

It’s all part of a worldwide effort to tap the best brains in computer science, in hopes their advanced ideas will pay off in key markets like “cloud computing,’’ energy-efficient data centers, and personal data management.

“We’re a collection of university research partnerships all around the world,’’ said the EMC Innovation Network’s director, Burton Kaliski Jr. “We’re not looking merely for the acquisition of knowledge, but the application of knowledge.’’

EMC launched the Innovation Network two years ago, when it formed alliances with several top universities in China. The company also is pursuing joint research projects with Indiana, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon universities, as well as the University of Michigan.

EMC already has a variety of research operations in Cambridge. Its RSA data security business has a lab in the city, as does its cloud computing unit, which develops ways to do crucial computing on remote computers connected to the Internet. VMware Inc., a maker of server virtualization software in which EMC owns a majority stake, also has a research presence in Cambridge.

But the new facility is specifically tasked with tapping the expertise of academic researchers at local schools, particularly MIT’s Media Lab.

“The Media Lab is kind of a conduit to a number of areas of research that are of mutual interest,’’ said Jeffrey Nick, EMC’s chief technology officer.

For example, students and faculty at the lab are working on clothing that can automatically collect information about a person’s health, such as heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure. The data could be uploaded to databases on the Internet, and made instantly available to doctors. EMC is working on storage systems that could efficiently house such information for millions of patients, as well as security software that would prevent the data from falling into the wrong hands.

“We found that we had a mutual passion around personal healthcare,’’ Nick said.

The Media Lab’s associate director, Andrew Lippman, said the EMC alliance helps ensure that students and faculty stay focused on research that delivers real-world benefits.

“Most of the students that we take, by design, are interested in the creation of an idea and the application of it,’’ Lippman said. “Laboratories that sit there and talk only among themselves lose their connection to reality. They could be investigating problems that nobody cares about.’’

Meanwhile, EMC expects its partnership in the Holyoke data center to provide a test bed for new data storage and processing concepts. The center is to be highly energy-efficient, and to rely on cheap hydroelectric power from the Connecticut River, but “that’s just table stakes,’’ Nick said. The center’s real value will be its ability to support large academic and corporate research projects, he said. “I see it as a place and an opportunity to deliver our latest and most advanced technology for early trial runs,’’ Nick said.