This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Workshop on Pattern Recognition with Support Vector Machines, SVM 2002, held in Niagara Falls, Canada in August 2002. The 16 revised full papers and 14 poster papers presented together with two invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 full paper submissions. The papers presented span the whole range of topics in pattern recognition with support vector machines from computational theories to implementations and applications.