The first International Workshop on Chance Discovery (CD) was held in the hot-springs resort of Matsue, Shimani Prefecture, Japan, on 22 May 2001, as part of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI-2001). Thirteen presentations were made to the workshop (Ohsawa, 2001), with 25 people attending. The majority of presenters and attendees were from Japan. An edited selection of the papers presented will be included in a volume of papers from the various International Workshops of JSAI-2001, to be published in the Springer series, Advanced Information Processing. A forthcoming special issue of the journal New Generation Computing will also address this topic.