Welcome to the post proceedings of the First International Conference on Embedded Software and Systems (ICESS 2004), which was held in Hangzhou, P. R. China, 9–10 December 2004. Embedded Software and Systems technology is of increasing importance for a wide range of industrial areas, such as aerospace, automotive, telecommunication, and manufacturing automation. Embedded technology is playing an increasingly dominant role in modern society. This is a natural outcome of amazingly fast developments in the embedded field. The ICESS 2004 conference brought together researchers and developers from academia, industry, and government to advance the science, engineering, and technology in embedded software and systems development, and provided them with a forum to present and exchange their ideas, results, work in progress, and experience in all areas of embedded systems research and development. The ICESS 2004 conference attracted much more interest than expected. The total number of paper submissions to the main conference and its three workshops, namely, Pervasive Computing, Automobile Electronics and Tele-communication, was almost 400, from nearly 20 countries and regions. All submissions were reviewed by at least three Program or Technical Committee members or external reviewers. It was extremely difficult to make the final decision on paper acceptance because there were so many excellent, foreseeing, and interesting submissions with brilliant ideas.