Intel has chosen Massachusetts Institute of Technology to host its Science and Technology Center, a center that will conduct research of Big Data for applications in economic analysis, healthcare and life sciences, retail-customer behavior analysis and government.

MIT will act as a hub for the center, collaborating with research staff from six other US universities. In broad terms, the center’s goals are to accelerate the pace of scientific and medical discoveries, enterprise and industrial computing and to boost innovation in design of data-intensive end-user experiences.

Justin Rattner, Intel’s CTO, said there was unprecedented growth of unstructured data, which would only accelerate further.

“For this massive amount of what is called ‘Big Data’ to be useful, it has to be analyzed to be made understandable,” he said. “Our goal is to innovate and guide this work across multiple fields, from medical to media, to extract meaning from large amounts of data.”

Research will focus on designing both hardware and software to make better use of unstructured data, which is a poor fit for relational models or conventional database systems.

Unstructured data can include streams of real-time financial-transaction data, behavior of users in social networks, climate and political developments. Analysis of these data together can lead to faster and better decisions.

In healthcare, a lot of data needs to be processed in genetics and gene expression, for example. Effectively analyzing these data can lead to customized treatments.