[5] Roy conducts research on language, games, and social dynamics at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology.

An author of over 150 academic papers[6][7] in machine learning, cognitive modeling, and human-machine interaction, his TED Talk, Birth of a Word (based on the 2006–2009 Human Speechome Project), has been viewed over 2.8 million times.

He is also co-founder and chairman of Cortico, a nonprofit media technology company whose Local Voices Network aims to foster constructive public conversations across political and cultural divides.

"[12] In 2018, Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral published "The spread of true and false news online" in Science.

[13] The paper examined "~126,000 stories tweeted by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times," and found that "Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information."