This is the ?rst edition of the Latin American Symposium on Dependable C- puting (proceedings of the LADC). LADC is the sole Latin American event dedicated to discussing the many issues related to computer system depen- bility. This symposium succeeded the well established Brazilian Symposium on Fault Tolerant Computers, which was a biennial event that lasted for 20 years. Although the symposium was based in Latin America, the intention was to attractresearchersfromallovertheworld. Therewere46papersubmissionsfrom Europe, and South and North America. The selection process was rigorous, with eachmanuscriptbeingsentoutforreviewtofourProgramCommitteemembers. A total of 19 papers were selected to be included in the proceedings, of which two were experience reports and three were short papers. In addition to these papers, we also invited Henrique Madeira and Eliane Martins to contribute with two papers, and we were very grateful that they accepted our invitation. LADC 2003 was privileged to have a very prestigious and dedicated Program Committee, that embraced an electronic reviewing process that was demanding and time consuming. We would like to thank its members for their dedication and e?ort in helping to put together the ?nal program. The electronic subm- sion and reviewing process was only possible due to the e?orts of Alan Cleber Borim and Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville in installing and maintaining the EDAS conference manager. As part of the technical program, we also included three invited talks and a panel.